Shatterfall
by Tandrelmairon
Summary: Clois in a dark AU. But maybe not a hopeless one. Chapter 6 up.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: I wanted to explore the Lois-Clark relationship unfolding in…well, essentially, a world under siege. Dark (never hopeless!) AU, with only a few points of contact with the movie series. T now, M later. Bear with me through the first page or so of exposition. Comments on how well the first page holds attention would be great._

_For anyone following Getting Eaten Alive, I want and plan to come back, but this one's fighting to get out._

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…"

_-- William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming_

The first time I met the Man of Steel, it didn't start well.

Which was a shame, but not a surprise. His feelings about the press were common knowledge. Though, to be fair, he'd never spoken of them once.

Jimmy and I were standing in the press crowd that warm night, outside the quiet condo complex that had just housed the latest tragedy. Superman was still inside looking for survivors. And our twenty-something new journalistic hire was up ahead of us, elbowing her way to the front.

Jimmy and I exchanged rueful glances, thinking of how recent our own elbowing days had been.

"But Lois," he assured me, as if I'd spoken aloud, "she's much calmer when the Assistant Editor's not looking over her shoulder."

_That_ problem had dogged me since Perry promoted me to that fearsome station, three years before, at the age of twenty-seven. "You're saying, I'm still scary?"

He grinned at me, somehow a man of twenty-two already, looking just like the sweet, gawky teen he'd been half a decade before. "You definitely still scare me."

Then we both grew solemn again the same moment. We knew we shouldn't be standing out there making unfunny jokes, when we both knew what had happened inside. Not that it was wrong to _think_ of jokes; I have too much respect for them as a coping mechanism. But to joke aloud there, laughing, maybe making some stranger think we did it all without respect for the dead.

And if I hadn't felt that moment of guilt, I think I would have handled everything afterwards differently.

As it was, when Superman stepped through the concrete wall of the complex with a child in his arms, into a night bright with flash bulbs turning like insectile eyes, the contempt on his face chilled me. I knew from video it was the same grim way he always changed, whenever he saw us clustered round his rescue scenes.

He turned her little body in his arms and pulled his cape over her head, the way he always did to hide victims' faces, and began to walk her through the press gauntlet lining his path, to the ambulance behind us. None of it new. But this time, it cut me to the core.

I had thought about his total disenchantment with the media many times before. I had realized long ago, with some sadness, that things might have been different. If we in the media had been free to be different. If the glorious thing that had been investigative journalism hadn't been squeezed to a husk by a decade of censorship law. If we hadn't been left with nothing to do but pick the tired carcass of the same tragedy as it happened over and again .

If, that is, it weren't for the same thing that had brought us here tonight, that had been happening all over the world, unpredictable, unstoppable, for the last fifteen years. The shatterfalls.

As he passed our spot in the lineup, my next reaction was irritation. Why would he judge us so superficially, for being here? It wasn't shock journalism. It was the only touchstone with reality left to Metropolis. It was all we could do to keep people informed, in a world where these shatterfall zones could open anywhere, any moment, in which molecules cracked their bonds at random and all things slid apart, and most flesh within the radius died.

As bad as knowing of the latest shatterfall was, not knowing was worse. People needed knowledge, or what they'd imagine and whisper would be more horrible still. And I felt, somehow, that Superman ought to know that, and it was a cheap shot to take at us. We weren't the enemy.

And then I looked again at the size of the little head under his heavy cape, and it was suddenly clear to me that it wasn't the stories that disgusted him. It was the photographs.

And he was right.

There was another way, I realized, that things might have been different. If there had been any rhyme or reason to it we could uncover, or even any rescues that didn't end predictably, with ten times as many dead as wounded. If there had been, that is, news to tell in any meaningful sense, instead of the same gory images time and again. It wasn't our fault.

But it wasn't – these pictures weren't – news.

His eyes swept the crowd – looking for what, I don't know – and met mine for a moment as they passed. I was included without distinction in that sweep of contempt. And as bitter as that moment was, it ocurred to me that five years ago I would have taken it far more personally.

He passed us. And I turned to Jimmy and said evenly, letting my voice carry, "Jimmy. Jimmy, stop rolling."

Jimmy turned his head from the eyepiece to look at me. He looked puzzled for a moment, but then I think he understood. He gave me a sad little smile and lowered the video camera from his shoulder, without taking his eyes from mine.

The other press around us turned to my voice, and then that forest of mechanical eyes and speakers was on me. My colleagues were no fools, and they sensed the potential for this to be something different. Maybe something a little less monotonously grim.

"The _Daily Planet,_" I continued, looking straight at Jimmy, "can cover this public tragedy without video of private tragedy. And its readers don't need _this_ film to help them grieve for their city, when the last one is still burned into their minds."

I hesitated. But I didn't want to leave it there, like I thought I was the lone voice of enlightenment suddenly holier than all my peers. "I suspect," I said more softly, "that the same might also be true of the _Gazette_. And the _Post_. And the _Star_."

My colleagues were mostly silent when I finished. It wasn't a hostile silence. Nor was it exactly repentant. They knew, like I did, that none of us had really chosen this. It was a listening, uncertain, weary silence.

And there in our struggling city, among a press crew that would always come after the fact to report the same disaster yet again, never knowing why it struck, I knew I was weary too. In fact, I had been weary for years. That was part of the problem.

How long had it been since I'd had the energy to _treat_ this like news? Maybe to run correlations on the shatterfall location patterns? Six months?

I smiled wryly and looked around at the cameras, the little red-blinking single eyes in the twilight. "Maybe," I said dryly, "the _Planet_ will even try some new pattern regressions. Just to pad out its article." I chuckled, hoping they would take it the way I meant it, like a tension breaker. Like an invitation.

Back in the crowd, one of my old Capitol beat buddies groaned. "God, Lane," he said darkly, "Not again."

I smiled. "It's been six months since we last tried. You never know."

I stepped back toward Jimmy and turned my back on the space that had opened around me. He caught my eye and we traded half-smiles, and as the babble started up around us, we reached down wordlessly to pack up our equipment. The ambulance had pulled away.

Superman was gone. No doubt he had missed it all.

"Yep," Jimmy said under his breath. "Still scare me."

I knew what he was feeling; it was the same way I felt. Not _good,_ exactly, on a night like this. But as if we suddenly had breathing room. Or a bit of self-respect.

Neither of us was going to say aloud that Superman's disappearance meant that the other residents were dead already. The shatterfall radius must have taken in most of the building. The physical structure might be compromised or, like the aftermath of a neutron bomb, it might be untouched. Flesh always gets the worst of it.

My cell phone rang on the way home. Big technology attracts shatterfalls, for some reason – momentous, world-changing technology, or power-intensive technology. Space-capable vehicles, nuclear plants, car factories, and for some reason, in-vitro fertilization draw them. Individual cell phones, thank God, don't seem to yet.

It was Perry. "Quite a decision the _Planet_ just made, _Assistant_ Editor Lane," he said blandly, without a hello. "Changed your views on self-censorship?"

But weary as I was, I could hear that he wasn't angry at all, and that thought warmed me for the first real time all day. "Come on, Perry," I answered, balancing the phone between my cheek and shoulder as I drove. "It wasn't self-censorship, because it wasn't news. I'll give you a litmus test. Would what I did annoy the government? If it would, it's not the big self-C."

He sighed. "Five years ago, you would have lit into _me_ for trying something like that, Lane."

He was right, and I was tempted to fire back with some of our old banter that had started in those days. I would have, to cheer us both up, if he hadn't sounded so tired himself. So instead I said, softly, "Do you disagree with what I did, Perry?"

There was a moment's silence. "Of course not," he said simply, after a moment. "Five years ago, I wouldn't have made you Assistant Editor." I smiled a little, turning the corner into my complex driveway, turning off the headlights. After a moment he added, "Do those regression analyses. You won't find anything. But you'll preserve our honor by trying."

"Consider it done."

"And Lane, are you married yet?"

I rolled my eyes, slamming the car door behind me and starting up the steps of my walkup. He had started that up in the past year, just when my mother had started to finally simmer down about it. "Three times last week alone. Why do you ask?"

"It's going to get worse, honey," he said simply. "I'm not going to keep you awake now and make you dig your heels in more again. But Richard still wants a second date some time, if you ever want to go that way. Just saying. Two are better than one."

I let myself in, dropped my bag and flicked the lights on. "Good night, Perry. Remember to shut down your reactor core."

He chuckled. "I think I left the space shuttle running, too. Good night." It wasn't funny, but it was our favorite joke regardless.

I started up the stove. Life had been easier when microwaves were safe.

It was a curious thing, the way Perry had started up with the marriage business after I had finally put it to rest.

My teen years before the shatterfalls were as full of fantasies of true love as most girls'. And Perry had watched me through my twenties, as one man after another fell short of my fairytale standards in some way and I decided it was time to get jaded. It's funny how eager I was to become cynical, as if it were a mark of wisdom.

It was, strangely enough, the collapse of Perry's marriage that had taught me some real sense on the subject. I watched it unravel as he tried to be at once a good man, a good husband, and a good leader of the free press, while our meaning and value were being rocked to the core. When our government was growing ever more secretive and militaristic under the onslaught of the shatterfalls, and none of us in the press knew how much of a gadfly we should bePerry was the best man I knew, and he couldn't do it all.

And somewhere in there, while the fibers of his life pulled apart, while it killed me to watch it killing him, I realized it wasn't the fault of the male sex if there wasn't a magic love that could fix everything. It wasn't anyone's fault. Not even mine.

I had Jimmy, and Perry, and Lucy and mom, and the memories of my dad. I was luckier than most of Metropolis. That was enough. If I had stayed cynical and angry about it, I think Perry would have tried to push me out of it, to keep my hopes tied to a romantic future. He would have thought I needed it to keep me human. As it was, instead, he just made me Assistant Editor.

Meanwhile the GDP kept plummeting, since you couldn't pay anyone enough to take a high-tech jobs. The after-looting of shatterfall sites got increasingly violent, till it was almost a relief when the Mob took over and organized it. And somewhere in there, Perry had decided the apocalypse was coming in our lifetime. And that I was going to need a healthy, battleworthy young man in my life, for purely practical purposes.

It was touching that he backed his nephew. Who, like the others, I liked, but never enough.

Superman was all that was holding Metropolis together. Otherwise we would have spiraled down into Perry's chaos years ago. _Pity_, I thought wryly as I stirred my soup, _that he hates me now. That can't bode well for my place on his rescue list._

_Would I even _make _the rescue list?_

And then he knocked on my balcony door.

I passed an instant of terror, as I first made out a human form. My heart tightened; I was halfway out of the chair, jumping back, before I realized it was him.

He stood outside the porch door, arms folded across his chest, grave and enormous and utterly still. The blue and red and gold of his uniform drew a wild brilliance from my little porchlight. And I, standing there, gaping at him, starting to shake with the adrenaline kick, wondered whether I should even be relieved or not.

_Ridiculous, Lois_, I talked myself down, not moving.

And it was. Whatever he thought of the press, he wasn't a bully. I had followed his public actions for years, in my own increasing discomfort with power and authority. He had sometimes taken stands I disagreed with. A few times I had seen him use his sway in matters where he shouldn't have had any. But his devotion to our city and our world were so heart-stoppingly real, they still moved me like nothing else did. And I had never, ever seen him stoop to intimidation.

And so it should have been easier for me to cross the room and open the balcony door.

His mass and strength filled up the space all around us; he, and the air itself, were perfectly still.

I looked up at his face, at the jet-black hair and the dark eyes in shadow beneath it.

_At least he doesn't_, I thought, _look angry just now_.

And then what possible reason could he have to come? It was almost unthinkable that after all this time, he'd suddenly want to talk to the press. I didn't even _blame_ him for that any more.

Or – my heart thudded up again – could it possibly be we had a shatterfall coming here?

The Man of Steel's greatest gift to us, in this war of attrition, isn't his strength or speed. It's the way he can hear a shatterfall coming, a high whine just barely audible even to him, as much as twenty minutes before it hits. It's enough, usually, to evacuate the area. But his range is only about three thousand miles, covering maybe a quarter of the earth's surface. It's while he evacuates one pre-fall in Shanghai that people die in Metropolis.

But there was none of that urgency, that stirring of unfathomed power I've seen in him on film in the face of disaster, in his eyes at that moment.

"I'm Lois Lane," I said, and held out my hand.

_Completely unnecessary, since _he_ came _here_. And now maybe he'll introduce himself in return._

His grip was huge, hot, flesh over steel, precisely not a hair too tight. Then he let me go.

And he said, softly, in his deep and near-human voice, "I'm sorry for coming uninvited, Miss Lane. Your address is public record."

I blinked. It seemed somehow ludicrous to imagine him using the phone to call ahead instead.

But for the first thing he'd ever said to me, it was more courteous than I'd expected. I shook my head. "Not at all."

His eyes are hard for humans to meet. They always seem to know a bit too much. But I met them, and tried to hold them. I owed it to him to be courteous as well.

Actually, irrelevantly, it occurred to me this might be the first time in years I had been truly safe from a shatterfall.

"I feel privileged, to finally get to meet you," I said after a moment. "But I don't think _you _came for the privilege of meeting _me._ Is there something I can do for you? I'd be glad to, if I could."

His lips twitched briefly. Not a smile, but not a gesture of rejection either. "May I speak with you, for a few moments?"

"Of course."

I looked at us, facing each other over my threshold, and hesitated. There was little point pretending the balcony was meaningfully more public, that it would change the dynamic between us in any real way. And, for the love of God, this was Superman.

So I added, "You're welcome, if you want to, to come in." Feeling the ridiculousness of it keenly, I was adding before I could catch myself, "That's a special exception. Most strangers don't get it."

He did almost smile that time, but then shook his head slightly. "Thank you. I can hear better out here."

_That_ brought the almost unreal mood of the past few moments crashing back down. How much did being inside affect his radius? How much did the ever-present need to listen control his life?

I nodded, feeling somehow vaguely embarrassed, as if I should have thought of it. He stepped back, politely, to let me out. I came out to the rail and gestured for him to make himself at home on my balcony.

He came up beside me and we looked out over the pitch blackness of the back woods. A few years ago, the sky behind them was still lit up at night, by the industrial quarter off in the distance.

And a few years ago, I would have been trembling with excitement at meeting such a celebrity. But the memory of the look in his eyes earlier sobered me. If he wasn't coming to rage at me, and stir up an answering anger that could meet him, maybe he was there to reproach me quietly. And I dreaded that somehow more.

"I wanted to thank you, for what you did tonight," he said finally. "It was a brave thing, in a way. I should have known better than to…expect so little all the time."

I blinked, in surprise, in relief. I felt something unclench a bit inside me, and realized I'd been even tenser than I'd known.

_All the time._ That made me sad all over again, wondering if he had any idea what a force for good my profession had been in American history.

"Investigative journalism," I said finally, pensively, wondering whether I was more addressing him or me, "has a long tradition of selective self-restraint, on matters genuinely unfit for print…matters that add nothing to the public understanding. One that has _nothing_ to do with self-censorship at all."

"I know," he answered softly.

I looked at him sharply, surprised again. He was looking back at me, his eyes almost invisible in the dark. Almost soothingly, he repeated, "I know." He looked back out at the woods. "I know I was ungracious earlier tonight," he said finally. "I'm sorry."

I blinked. His one furious gaze was the only statement he'd made. It was the only statement he'd ever made. But apparently, he knew as well as we did how it carried.

After a long moment, half-against my better judgement, I said what it felt I'd been waiting to say for a long time. "You're not a big fan of the press, Superman."

Five years ago, it would have been caustic. Or light, almost teasing, a thrust for him to parry. Now I just wanted to say it, and see what he'd say in return.

He turned to face me, arms still folded over his massive chest. "I'm an equal 'fan', Miss Lane," he said with similar simplicity, "of every item on your Bill of Rights. The first included." He paused, looking at me, with that barely-perceptible softening of his public sternness that he uses in private conversation. "But not because they aren't all dangerous beyond words."

I smiled at him, a real smile for the first time that night. Not just because I agree entirely – those rights are not cheery pastel glows of enlightenment. They can be used to do devastating harm. No one knows that better than the press, except maybe the government. I worry that people who are _sentimental _about the good days before the censorship laws are missing the point.

I smiled to hear that he, who spent so much time chasing down armed looters and being trailed by the half-free press, who knew the costs of our remaining freedoms so well, in some way still believed in them.

"Yes," I said softly.

He ran one hand through his hair. I turned back to the woods. I didn't want, just then, to pepper him with questions, to push him to define his views. I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to know, for my own thinking, for my and Perry's wrestling with the question of what our profession could do for our people.

"Miss Lane," he said after a moment. "I do know that you still have to sell papers tomorrow."

I looked back up at him, surprised yet again. He swallowed, like a man taking a particularly nasty medicine, and said more softly still, "I wondered if you wanted an interview."

I almost fell over the railing. It was an event in itself. It was unthinkable, delicious, astonishing. It would be the media coup of the decade. His beliefs, his friends, his hopes, his vision for our future. It was a princely gift.

And I couldn't take it. Because it would look like a bone thrown to me, for holding back in our coverage. An incentive to hold back the next time, for the next bone.

I closed my eyes, hating myself for choosing this night to regain some self-respect.

Aloud, I said, "I _desperately_ want an interview. " And then I sighed and turned to face him. "But I'm not sure I like the precedent." I rubbed the back of my neck, hoping I didn't sound ungrateful; I wasn't. "The Capitol beat boys tell me the White House does the same thing to them all the time."

Superman glanced over at me. "With disturbing effectiveness," he agreed.

I blinked. He nodded slowly, looking out into the wood beside me. I watched him from the corner of my eye. "I won't insult you," he added after a moment, "by pretending not to follow. I'm not sure you're not making the right decision." He hesitated. "Though the White House seems to prefer _positive_ coverage."

"Where _you_ prefer none, yes," I agreed wryly.

He looked over at me with a dry twinkle in his eye. After a moment he said, "But I hope you'll believe, at least, that my primary motive was gratitude. Sincerely."

I did. And meeting his eyes, about to start thanking him anyway, as I let the opportunity of the decade slip away, I felt better than I should have. Better than I'd felt in a long time.

"If it helps," he added after a moment, with the corners of his lips just barely quirking up, "you should know I have no intention of _ever_ giving you another exclusive. Whether you muzzle yourself for me in future or not."

It was like taking a pin to the gathering tension of that night, of that week, of the last years. There on my balcony with Kal-El, the Lord of the Skies, I laughed aloud. He looked back at me, with that dry gleam in his eye that would have been at least a chuckle from another man.

We stood that way for a long moment, as I weighed it. I wanted it badly. And I wanted suddenly, crazily, to talk with him more. To learn how not to be opponents when we both wanted the best for Metropolis, me and this son of a world that had destroyed itself. To see if he would ever, ever listen to me about the downstream effects of his occasional heavy hand on the justice system.

But I was responsible for not just the reality of being bought, but the appearance of it. The other papers follow the _Planet._

Finally, softly, I said, "Could I take a rain check?"

He barely lifted his eyebrows.

"I need a little time," I added. And then I heard myself continuing - "We _can_ be independent without being predatory. It doesn't have to be like this."

I don't know which of us was more surprised. But something did soften in his eyes that moment, as he searched my face. He looked up at the black sky for a moment, then back down at me. "Call for me," he said finally. "When you're ready. When you want your interview."

I held out my hand to him again. He reached out and shook it - that massed power, that perfect control.

And then he stepped back; standing straight, without a muscle twitching, he shot up into the sky, and the air around me rushed into his vacuum.

This originally read "fourth". Turns out I was confusing the Fourth Estate (the press) with the Fourth Amendment. Sigh. The intended reference here is of course to freedom of speech, and to freedom of the press specifically. Sorry.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: Please bear with me through another page of exposition here. Comments on the same issues as last chapter would be great. Since the review reply feature remains down, let me clarify here: this is an alternate universe, and the events of Superman I/II and Superman Returns didn't happen in this one, though there are a few parallels. There will be more clarity about the shatterfalls coming._

The second time I spoke with the Man of Steel, the setup was a near-guarantee to make him like me even less.

It wasn't the literal second time. Because that first night on my balcony had an effect I never would have predicted. It drew me back into the field. It made me wonder if the answer to the journalistic angst I'd been wallowing in at my desk might be out there. If maybe there was another way to do it all, other stories in the shatterfalls that we could make a difference by telling.

Perry said nothing. I think he was afraid to have much hope, but more afraid to quash mine. Even if it all wasted the paper's time and money. Which it did.

I _had_ been working on some projects that were peripheral but still worthwhile. A piece on the old street gang habit of fallbaiting in rival territory - deliberately planting any small, high-current device to bring on a shatterfall. It was things like that, the human reply to the new madness of nature, that had brought the censorship laws and the curfews down on us.

And I had been planning a four-parter on the rise of shatterfall cults, from the harmless ones that preached repentance to the ones that left fallbait on subways. In fact, I had a good inside source on that story - an earnest, solemn young programmer, who had been drawn in to a fallbait cult by the hope of enlightenment. And then shocked to his senses by the darkness he found there.

But all of that work slowed to a crawl. Because I started prowling the shatterfall rescue scenes again.

And Superman noticed me, as he notices everything. I was usually at the edge of the press crowd, looking for something different without knowing what. We rarely spoke, but he would glance at me from time to time, with that dry twinkle in his eye.

I never tried to ask him questions; I wasn't ready for that. But I listened at his lesser rescues, as people took the chance to ask their questions and speak their thoughts, profound and banal. When he could, he answered them.

What the world knew about him – the destruction of his homeworld, his coming as a refugee, why kryptonite radiation was so deadly to him – came all from his quiet answers to those questions. But what Krypton had been like, how his people had lived before they died – to those questions he gave variations on the same grave, courteous answer. "Better to leave that to the dead. This is a good world here. It doesn't need to seek out that one."

And once I heard someone suggest this was like the Cold War over again, and all our government's measures were like bomb drills, like hiding under school desks from nuclear fallout. He replied that for shatterfall survivors, it was more like the Gulf War, with its strange after-syndromes. In the _same conversation_, it came out that he had no favorites for the Grammys.

Once, I'm certain he saw me slip past the police line and deliberately turned his back. He never broke the law, but he was a bit selective about enforcing it.

And that was his relationship with law and government, in a nutshell – both of them defenders of order, one a bit wary of the other, doing his own work along its massive edges. And I was pondering that already, on the day I heard that one of the local loot gang leaders, one Thomas Link, had gotten thirty years without parole.

Because there was a weapon involved, that wasn't outside the penal range of the law. It was just far, far out on the edges. And from the moment I heard, there was no doubt in my mind that Superman was behind it.

He was doing it again, having a word somewhere with the judge about his personal opinion on sentencing. I could imagine him in that conversation, grave and quiet, arms folded. Not demanding, just speaking, with just the immense authority of honor that was his.

He had done it before. Six times known for certain, and a dozen times I suspected. But now that I had met him, it bothered me much more deeply. I kept remembering his curious gentleness in our conversation, the quiet allegiance to civil rights and justice I had sensed from him. I didn't know what to think.

So I did what I'm paid to do. I looked for the patterns. I looked at the stories of those men he'd put away longer than most. And after those weeks of pounding my head against the wall on the shatterfalls again like I had years before, _this_ mystery dropped into my hand.

The basic connection only took a weekend. The implications took a week. And then they were so obvious I wanted to kick myself, and so disturbing I spent a few hours in a daze.

Getting up the courage to face him about it took me one very, very long day.

So it was nearly curfew by the time I forced myself out onto my balcony, searching the dark skies as if I'd see him there. I looked down at my hands, shaking just a little, and thrust them into my pockets. My lips and fingers tingled with a cigarette craving I hadn't felt for years, since I gave them up when the rationing started. I shook my head. _Look at me. What a mess._

"Superman," I said softly into the warm night, watching the treetops wave on the breeze. "Could I speak with you?"

Maybe he was over three thousand miles away, outside his hearing radius, and wouldn't come. Maybe he had reasons and logics utterly beyond me, and I was wrong about it all because my thinking was human. Or maybe I was right, and he would wholeheartedly agree, and thank me for the things I pointed out.

Or maybe I had no idea what unguessed wild depths of the power of the Lord of the Skies I was tangling with. Maybe this night would end in ways my mind had never imagined, and nothing would ever be the same.

_When his people exploded their own planet, all a world's green glory blown to dust and fire, did they even need technology to do it? Or was that power, and that possibility, in their own bodies all along?_

He landed quietly beside me, with a massive silence that made me think of a panther. I turned to face him and my breath caught a little, seeing him again. That same stillness and brilliance and glory. I wondered if anyone ever grew used to it, unfazed by it.

_I must be out of my mind._

"Miss Lane. Are you all right?" I caught just a thin edge of weariness in his voice; we looked at each other. There was soot on his face and he smelled of smoke, and that brought me back to earth. I was ashamed of myself. This was Superman. Not a mob boss, not a shadow agent of my increasingly disturbing government. He had just come from his hundredth hundredth rescue, he was a friend to my city and a good man, and he deserved to have someone speak the truth to him.

Even if he _was_ subverting the rule of law.

"Thank you for coming," I said, hoping he didn't routinely search us for our hearts beating madly, our blood vessels contracting. No, ridiculous; of course he'd _hear_ our heartbeats. Or was his hearing voluntary, did he have to focus it? "I won't make a habit of this."

He shook his head. "I have a debt to you. I hadn't forgotten."

I smiled thinly at that. I turned to face the house, parallel to him, and looked at the ground for moment, gathering my thoughts.

"Though you seem," he added, "to be leaning more toward field work than personal pieces recently. I may not be as helpful with your new line of interest."

I laughed, and I knew if I looked up I'd see that dry but not unfriendly gleam again. "You've got some of the blame for that," I answered, because it was true. "You lit a bit of a fire under me that night."

He turned opposite me, his red cape soft and heavy trailing on the ground, and looked out on the woods. "That wasn't my intention, you know." He paused. "But I hope you'll find something new. You never know."

I closed my eyes for just a moment, steeling myself. If things were different, this could be the start of a good conversation. We had a good atmosphere, that moment, full of promise. I would have liked to go on that way for a few moments before I had to break it. But that would make it seem almost treacherous when I did.

I took a deep breath. "I did find something."

He knew from my tone, I think, that I wasn't talking about shatterfalls. He raised his eyebrows; I couldn't see any shift in his body at all.

I turned to face him. "I found the story of Thomas Link. And Angel Gotuzzo and Jaime Molina, Jamal Simmons, Bradley and Christopher Fox, and Precious Smith."

Superman said nothing. And then, as the appropriate moment to ask what the connection was passed, he continued to say nothing.

I kept my hands in my pockets, wiping the sweat off against my pants. "It's not illegal, what you're doing," I said after a moment.

"No," he said softly, and my heart clenched again. He wasn't denying it. And no matter how this conversation ended, one way or another, things would have changed for good.

Unless, I thought bizarrely, suddenly, the reaches of the untapped depths of his powers included human minds.

Was he not denying it because he accepted that I knew? Or because he could, maybe, fix me with those almost-human eyes and make me forget it again?

I shook my head violently. _Sanity, Lois. Keep it together._

_It's not as if there's anything you could do about that anyway._

I looked up at him, annoyed with myself for being frightened, for obsessing on the ramifications for me and me and me. That wasn't what I'd called him for.

"Superman," I said after a moment, slowly, "I accept that there's much here I don't understand." I looked out over the forest for a moment, the treeline almost lost as the last traces of sunset darkened. "I don't have…an immediate compunction to print this." _God help us. It's a wonder we print anything._

He raised his eyebrows. "Which is probably good for your circulation. Since it's public knowledge already."

"The ones I _mentioned_ are public knowledge, yes."

It was the first time I'd ever seen him look startled. Five years ago, I would have felt some triumph over that.

"What is it you want to say, Miss Lane?" he asked me finally.

I sighed. "What should I say? Can you explain it to me? Are their crimes more heinous in some secret way? Or do you see the future, or read their minds, and stop the crimes they _will_ commit?"

He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I can't help you here. If you have questions on other subjects, I'll try to answer them."

_As long as they're on the approved list?_ I thought, and bit it back. It wasn't fair, conflating him with my government. Even if just now, they both troubled me in the same way.

"Superman," I said softly, "You know it's not about whether this is new. It's not about whether it's legal. It's about the implications of it. You never went to law school and you were never appointed to the bench, and you're dictating sentencing."

He looked back at me so implacably, with just the wind fluttering the tips of his hair and the rest of him like a statue, that I felt as if the conversation were already over. As if he were maybe looking straight through me, his attention moved on to something God knew how distant. I had the sudden sense that in a minute he would leave.

And so I found myself stepping closer to him, fixing his eyes with mine. "And if you're the man I think you are, that should scare the hell out of you. Your respect for judiciary independence means everything. _You're the last incorruptible thing we have_."

He blinked as if he'd genuinely forgotten I was there. He looked down at me – at least, looking at me now – and with that, those thoughts about whether I'd come out of this with my memory intact started clamoring again. We were staring at each other – _is that how a mind-wipe starts?_

_Grow up, Lane._

Abruptly, he inclined his head, and said, "I should go." He turned from me. And there with his back to me, starting his crouch, he said, "Thank you for speaking to me on this."

I was exasperated. And at the same time I was starting to shake with a new fear, as I realized what I had to do. My heart pounded up again, and then I was stepping forward, and literally grabbing his cape.

It was an outrageous thing to do. My hand shook on the heavy cloth as if it would burn me. He stopped without turning, the porch light gleaming off each strand of his hair.

And before he could decide how to get rid of me, I said, low and tight, "Keeping your most vindictive enemies from seeing sunlight in the next thirty years isn't going to solve your problem."

Silence. And then, so softly I could barely make it out, without twitching, he said, "What is my problem, Miss Lane?"

I dropped my hand. Trying to keep my voice steady, trying not to think beyond the moment, I said, "Your problem is that your knowledge of pop culture starts twenty-five years ago. And ends about ten years later. You're good with the Gulf War. Not so good with the Grammys."

The air around me _popped_. I hadn't blinked, but now he was facing me, looking down, his eyes eight inches from mine. There was a new glitter in them I'd never seen. He had whipped around faster than my eye could transmit.

I didn't know what kind of danger I might be in. But apparently, my guesses had been right.

_In for a penny, in for a pound, Lane. _I took a deep breath and met his eyes, my heart pounding so wildly I was sure _I_ could hear it.

Because the first pattern I had noticed was what all the men he was pushing thirty-year sentences for had in common. Out-of-state connections, and the nasty habit of punishing people who got in their way - _through their families. _

And when it occurred to me he was protecting someone, when I started watching his public statements through that lense, it had taken me a week to realize he didn't talk like a strange visitor come lately from another planet.

He talked like a man who had lived among humans and then left them again. And possibly, even, who had not once in all his days seen that other planet we called his home.

After a moment, his voice so dry I could hear sticks snapping in it, he said, "I wasn't about to leave, just now. I _was_ about to say, 'And thank you for confronting me on this. I'll withdraw my sentencing advice about Link.' "

"Oh," I said dully. "Shit."

He stepped back, and straightened, without taking his eyes from me. "And what conclusion do you draw from all this, Miss Lane?" he asked quietly.

My game was up. He knew the worst of what _I_ knew now, and we would have to see what came of it. There was no point being coy.

And in the midst of it all, looking at him there on my balcony, I _wanted_ to be honest with him. I wanted to hear what he would tell me. I wanted to understand what this all meant, for who he was and what he wanted. The circumstance could hardly have been worse, but it was a magical, wonderful thing – the Man of Steel was maybe once a child. He had people he loved. There were things in the world still undreamt of; there were secrets about better things than shatterfalls.

"I draw," I said finally, "that you lived among humans once, and then you stopped. You had done it secretly; there was no public knowledge of your powers before you came to Metropolis. If you age the way we do, you were a child and they raised you. Those thirty-year sentences you keep pushing for probably cover what remains of their expected lifespans. And either you still live that life at times, or you ended it."

And that about covered it.

"Ended it," he said softly, "how?"

I rubbed my face. I had gone down this road as well, but I didn't like it; all the answers I could think of were so sad. "Assuming that, I would guess you…made a story that could cover an indefinite absence. Or you faked a death. Or a suspicious disappearance."

"And how many suspicious disappearances happen in a year, Miss Lane?"

"In America?"

His lips barely quirked up. "For argument's sake, in America. Though for what it's worth, I'm told my Russian and my European languages are exactly the quality of my English."

I almost laughed at that, almost forgetting myself. But I had, in fact, done my homework. "Eight thousand annually. Of whom two thousand are men between fifteen and twenty-three. Given a five-year window, ten thousand candidates in the States alone."

And then I realized how that sounded, and I thought of that far-off family he was so invisibly tied to, wondering if he ever went home. Quickly I added, "If I _wanted_ your secret." I took a half-step closer to him, watching the slight workings of his face. "Which I don't."

He turned from me and stared out into the woods. It was suddenly an intensely private moment, and I felt wrong watching him, watching it sink in that a wall of fifteen years' standing had been breached by a relative stranger.

_I didn't mean you any harm_, I wanted to say. But then we in the press never _mean_ to harm anyone by the secrets we uproot. I had broken his secret without his consent. I would give him privacy to react to it. I turned my back.

Of course, if I had picked it up, someday others would too. It would have been no favor to keep silent about it. If I hadn't called him down from the sky to rebuke him, I might have had to do it to warn him anyway.

_And can he erase my memory from behind? Or would he have to make eye contact?_

_Lane, act your age._

"Miss Lane," he said behind me. I decided regretfully that it wouldn't be quite the thing to turn round with my eyes screwed shut.

I looked back at him. He hadn't moved. He looked weary – had he before, coming straight from some disaster in the world, and I had been too preoccupied to notice? Or was it this conversation that had done it?

"I think you understand the stakes here without my belaboring them."

"This," I said softly, "isn't 'news.' You…" _They? He? She? _"…aren't in danger from me. But I can't be the only one to notice forever."

"No," he agreed. And then, after a moment, "But you'd be surprised."

Without thinking, as if that were an invitation to an intimacy on the subject, I asked him the other question that had been hounding me for the last day. "Does your family know? Or do they think…" I trailed off, realizing what an outrageously personal question it was from someone who had just violated his privacy so completely. _Well done, Lane._

He looked startled for the second time. "Of course they know. What kind of monster do you think I…"

Then _he _trailed off, looking at me differently, as if putting things together for the first time. And his eyes _changed_, in some clear, organic, but crystalline way.

I was suddenly almost certain he _was_ looking through me. I think he took in the aftershakes of my hands in my pockets, all the changes of the waning fight-or-flight response, and realized for the first time how frightened I had been.

"What," he asked slowly, "did you think I would do, on learning that you had these thoughts?"

And as irritated, embarrassed and nervous as I'd been by turns that night already, I felt suddenly deeply panged. More than I had even in the press crowd, the night we met. It wasn't shame – with the conflicting things I'd learned, I don't think my fears had been completely mad. It was sorrow.

Without meaning to, I'd slandered him to myself. I'd hurt a good man by misjudging him so completely. Not deeply, maybe – we didn't have the history to give me that power. But truly, and I felt it in my own chest.

"I'm sorry," I said, not knowing what else to say. I laughed a little, hollowly. "I had these ideas about…maybe messing with my memory…"

He raised his eyebrows, looking almost intrigued. "Really? By what mechanism?"

I was feeling more foolish by the moment, which was a poor improvement on heartless. I couldn't possibly go into more detail about how maybe he'd stare into my eyes or put his fingers on my forehead. Or something. Finally I said, "No one really knows the extent of your powers."

Dryly, he replied, "They don't, apparently, compare to the extent of your speculation."

I laughed out loud. I had to – too much adrenaline for any more silence and subtlety. I looked back up at him and his shaken, weary look was starting to fade; he had that old gleam back.

After a moment I said, "I'm sorry."

And, feeling like a prime idiot, wanting him to know I wasn't afraid, I held out my hand to shake again.

He shook his head. "The fault was mine, wasn't it? Because your own fears prove your point. I overstepped myself."

And then he took my hand and shook it, without any comments about how maybe he wiped minds with a handshake, for which I was profoundly grateful. And then he let go and looked back down at me.

"Miss Lane," he said softly, "shall we try to be less afraid of each other, you and I?"

I looked at him, feeling light with relief, remembering that dawning wonder I'd felt at the thought of the Man of Steel as an infant, and now as a faithful son or brother. "People who aren't afraid of me," I answered, "call me Lois."

He cocked his head in acknowledgment. Then he added, "I'll withdraw my request about Link. And, I suppose, find some way to make my knowledge of the world less…uneven."

I had to smile. "Perhaps you ought to start getting the paper."

That glimmer in his eyes was becoming my equivalent, in him, to a full-out laugh. "I'll take that under advisement. Lois." He started to turn to go.

Then he turned back. He hesitated for a moment, and then added, "Almost no one calls me Kal."

I blinked.

"But not," he added pensively, "because I've ever objected."

I looked at him, wondering how far to push my luck. Then I decided, _very far_. "If we speak again, some time…I'll try it out."

He stepped back, politely, to keep the wind of his leaving from whipping me. "Thank you."

And then he was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

"A shatterfall cult," my source J.J. once told me, "is kind of like a bar at happy hour. People are there for one of three or four reasons, but you don't know who's there for which. And it's a little rude to ask."

"_Rude_?" I echoed, imagining a dark basement full of hooded figures assembling fallbait devices, all saying 'please' and 'thank you'.

"Lois," he replied mildly, "I know cult etiquette _much _better than I do normal human interaction. It's rude."

That was early after J.J. first approached me. It had surprised me at first that a young, clean guy with a future and hardly any past would rather talk to a newspaper than to the police. Most of my street sources are men who want to stop an occasional outrage without actually breaking from the underworld.

That was before I understood, before he figured out how to articulate, that he wasn't really hoping to stop fallbaits. He was trying to lay open his cult's secrets to the world, until no more naïve, unsatisfied, semi-spiritual fools would be tempted to join a fallbait cult again.

He was hoping to be done by the New Year.

Besides which, in those early days, no one told him anything before it went down. They just had him managing the servers where they kept their meditations, and maintaining the public website they used for their public face. And, God bless his intense little heart, I think that humbled him.

"God, Lois," he said once, shaking his head, "I've failed as a _fallbait foot soldier_. Where do you go when you're underqualified for _that_?"

"To the _Planet_," I said cheerfully, patting his shoulder. "To be a hell of a source. But I bet they're just grooming you for something better. You're probably fallbait tenure track."

He sighed. "No. I'm the fallbait webmaster."

The three reasons people joined, in J.J.'s opinion, were the hunger for meaning, the hunger for security, and the hunger for power. He had pity for the first and contempt for the second; the people with the third were the ones he was hoping to expose.

I thought about his comment many times that Christmas day, when a Montana shatterfall cult took four hundred hostages to bargain with Superman.

They wanted him to rain fire on the U.S. Capitol Building, a "hotbed of corruption" and an offense to whatever power they worshipped. Within the hour.

There was one part of their statement I remember fixating on, irrelevantly. "No one you may be thinking of arresting," said the tape released to the news networks, "can negotiate concessions or good faith gestures at this point. The process is automated from beginning to end. The Capitol explodes, or the hostages do. Superman, it's possible, if you're listening, that when they all scream together, you might just hear them."

It was the boldest move a shatterfall cult had ever made. It showed a depth of resources no one had ever dreamed any of them had – to kidnap a small village and keep them somewhere soundproof. Had to be underground. Had to be a place built for the purpose, that no one had records of building.

And as a genuine request, it would have been an idiot gesture. They clearly could have blown the building up themselves for half the cost.

Anyone could see it was an opening move. It was a question: could you force Superman to negotiate? And the world got its answer ten minutes later, from here in Metropolis, when he stood before our cameras and made his first press statement to date. It was three words long.

"I don't bargain." Then he turned and walked away from the podium.

He clearly hadn't needed long to think about it.

Standing there in the Planet bullpen, watching the live feed, it stunned me. And then it surprised me to be so surprised. I remember standing there, turning from the screen and leaning on one unsteady cubicle wall.

Four hundred people were still out there somewhere, breathing and praying, and didn't know they were already dead.

We all spent that hour watching our feeds - the SWAT teams swarming over the Montana countryside, search and rescue dogs howling their confusion in the empty town. There wasn't time to track down any weeping out-of-town relatives. And then the hour passed.

If it had already happened when we first heard of it, it would have been…well, news. We would have reacted with the same few minutes of solemn quiet one always feels for the death of strangers. But after it unfolded there in front of us, there were tears in every eye I saw around me.

I've told enough of that part now. I think sorrow for strangers is always the same. If you hear they're suffering, it's better to feel it than to feel nothing; but there's no good done by inflicting that feeling on those who can do nothing to help.

I will say this, though. During that long day there was soon less talk about the deaths than about Superman's role. And the mad, strange thing was this. Of twenty reporters I talked to, trying to figure out who was all right and who needed to be sent home early, _no one_ blamed him.

And, ethically speaking, neither did I.

We all said the same thing to each other, back and forth, again and again: giving in, even burning an empty building, would be killing the _five_ hundred people they kidnap next. Would eventually kill thousands. He had to stop it now, had to make it piercingly clear that they would never get even so small a quarter. He must have called the press conference the minute he got the demand, to emphasize that point.

All completely true. But in part, it broke my heart that there was no one there, not one, to rage in misguided fury that those were _people_, dammit, and who the hell did he think he was? The shatterfalls have taught all of us to think demographically. And it's right. But I kept thinking how strange it was, that we had all learned to grieve without questioning.

I think Perry did question it, a little, though we never spoke of it. Because glancing at him, I kept thinking he looked the way my dad used to look after his chemo - when you know the disease is what will kill you, but the cure is what's making you sick.

I watched our replays of Superman's press statement over and over, realizing that moment was going to become iconic in our history. And I found myself wondering how many of all these thoughts went through _his_ mind. Did it haunt him? Was he subject, like us, to regrets - not only for things he _would_ change if he could, but for things he wouldn't?

And should he be?

I'm sure it's wrong, for humans, to be able to move on too easily. But was it wrong for him, for this son of a different lineage? It was his job to protect humans, not to be one. He had never promised us that. And he had looked so completely…other.

Not cold, not heartless exactly. But there seemed, in the replays, to be a strange and alien calculus behind his eyes. Another world's logic, looking out on us by another world's light, thinking thoughts not like ours. We were probably right about the reason he had done it, I thought all that day, as we scrapped and rewrote the evening edition. But we were wrong if we thought we understood how he thought.

I needed to check on Lucy, but I didn't yet feel up to talking. I drove home that night in silence._ I'm sorry for you, Kal-El, if you're suffering now. If you are, your grief must be a hundred times what ours is. _

_But I'm almost more sorry for you if you're not._

I was heating up my stew from a can when J.J. called.

"Lois? Where are you?" He sounded tense, stretched.

"Home. What's wrong? Are you all right?" We had always been painfully discrete in our meets. But the first thing you always think of, when your source sounds like that, is that somehow he's been made. You imagine that he's calling you for a ride from a phone booth somewhere, checking over his shoulder for his old friends coming for him.

"All right? I'm better than some people. God. Did you see…oh. That's a stupid question."

I rubbed my eyes. "I saw it." _If he worked at the Planet, he's definitely one I'd have to send home._ "_Are_ you all right?"

"Are you really home?"

I blinked. "Really, really. J.J., what's going on? Do you need help?"

"Home _alone?_"

"J.J., for the love of God, are you in trouble or not? Yes, home alone."

"Then can I come in?"

I almost dropped my spoon in the stew. _Strange day_. I went to the door and looked through the peephole. There he was, alone, looking desperately wound up.

But not frightened, exactly.

He came in without a word, and I locked the door behind him and watched him scan the room. He looked all right, unmarked. Slightly scruffy as always, his blond hair a mess, deadly serious. He looked back at me.

"Lois," he said, "I know when our next fallbait goes down."

He had, apparently, achieved his hacker's dream, of finding their dark secrets in their files. Not because they kept organization-wide notes on when and where. But because some members were spying on others, tapping phones, bugging rooms, making transcripts. And because those conversations sometimes included their plans.

Who was spying, and why exactly, he didn't know. Another mole? Operatives of our government? Random loyalty checks?

"But I'll be damned if I use _my_ cell to say anything important again," he said darkly.

We sat and looked at each other for a long time, in mixed horror, delight and awe. As long as this window stayed open, God only knew how many fallbaits we could thwart.

"It's a pity," he added, as an afterthought, "that we can't take this to the police."

I closed my eyes for a long moment. I had been afraid he would feel that way. He had once told me there were three beat cops in his cell alone. That much, I believed. His speculations about how much farther up it all went, his dark theories about moles above moles above moles, going farther up forever like a series of mirrors reflecting each other – those, I didn't know what to do with.

_Oh, J.J. You're living in the lion's den. Of course you're paranoid. But you're probably right._

"All right," I said finally. "We'll call Superman."

He blinked. He cocked his head at me. "You can _do_ that?"

I thought about it. Yesterday, I'd have had no doubt that if I called, he would at least come and hear me out. I'd have been confident I knew him that well, at least. After today…but the events of today weren't relevant, directly, were they? I sighed, imagining the two of us standing out there and talking to the empty sky, feeling increasingly foolish, wondering when to give up.

And then I thought again of his deliberate distancing this morning. And it occurred to me for the first time to wonder if he'd want _anyone_ going round claiming he'd come when they called. Whether it was true or not.

I looked back up at J.J. Finally, I said, "We've spoken a couple of times. Briefly. It seemed to me…if I said it was important…he might believe me enough to listen."

Then I cocked an eyebrow at him. "And frankly, J.J., if Superman's also part of your conspiracy, then we're already done for."

He gave me a reluctant smile. "No, it's a good idea, I like it. Just wait half an hour or so till I'm home."

"What? Why? You should talk to…" And then I trailed off, looking at the sudden graveness of his face. I sighed and buried my face in my hands.

_J.J., you utter paranoid, you conspiracy nut, always imagining the worst. And once again, you're not even wrong._

"Because God only knows," he said in bitter deadpan, as he watched me get it, "whether the Man of Steel is a Good Citizen."

The Good Citizen Act was two years old at the time. And it had done us in the media more damage than all the censorship laws and the curfews combined. Every adult citizen who got knowledge or hearsay about seditious activities was required to contact an officer of the law, to turn over all his information – _and his sources_.

At first, six journalists went to jail for their sources. Most of the rest fell in line. A few learned their way around anonymous sourcing. And I, from behind my editor's desk, had been playing the unscrupulous legal counsel, keeping our folks just within the letter of the law, without ever facing it myself.

Till now.

It was sweet, in retrospect, that J.J. had brought _me_ this without hesitation. Though, come to think of it, God knew how long he'd driven around in circles _outside_ my place first.

Of course, that meant that if Superman complied with the law, I'd go to jail instead of J.J. That was less sweet.

I think he saw me get that, as well. "Lois," he said mildly, "the difference between us is that _you'd_ make it out of jail alive."

I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes for a long time.

I already knew I'd do it; I was just waiting for my stomach to catch up. It _was_ the best option, and J.J. was probably right about his old friends hunting him down in jail, and there was no real doubt in my mind the Man of Steel was no Good Citizen.

It was just that it was my first felony.

Finally I looked back up at him and gave him a half-smile. "I know why you really don't want to go to jail. It's your boyish face."

"And my supple skin," he agreed without hesitation. "See?" He held out his arm and pinched it for me.

I laughed; I couldn't help it.

God only knew how Kal-El and I would talk tonight, standing in the shadow of the last outrage and discussing the one to come, side-by-side on my balcony across millions of miles and the divergence of species. But at least the people I worked with wouldn't kill me if they knew. J.J. was more than brave enough already.

"Go home, J.J. I'll take care of your mass murder for you."

And so half an hour later I was out there again, with the first cool drops of rain just starting to speckle the wooden deck, saying to the starless sky, "Kal, please, I need to speak to you. It's important."

Silence; the dark trees rustled. The raindrops became more regular.

_And what do we do if he doesn't come?_

_Keep calling, probably. Try again. Have to set my alarm for every half hour all night, in case he's out of range just now._ _In one of his other five hearing-quadrants of the earth. _

I sighed and turned to go in before I got soaked.

"Lois?"

He had landed without a sound, without the wood creaking. I wondered if he rested his weight on it at all. Then I turned and saw him.

He looked as beaten down, as sad and weary, as any man could look without changing his single expression. In fact – _am I seeing Dad everywhere today_, I wondered, _or does he have that same sick look to him, like he took poison as medicine one more time?_

"I'm sorry. There was a carjacking, in Madison. Are you all right?"

_God,_ I thought, _are you?_

_But do you say that, to Superman? Or will it make things worse?_

"I'm all right. I…well, first, thank you. For coming."

He hesitated. He searched my face as the rain started to patter. And then, after a moment, he said, "It's no trouble. But I wonder, this time…is it possible it could wait a few hours?"

I blinked. I wondered for a moment whether there was anything specific he wanted the time for, and what that might be.

And then, looking more closely at him, I realized he looked almost like a man braced for a blow. And _then,_ in light of our last conversation, it occurred to me he actually looked like a man expecting a rebuke again

I felt a churn of pity for him; and in the midst of that, I almost chuckled, with black amusement, to realize the fallbait story was actually going to come as a relief.

"I have a source who knows about a fallbait planned tomorrow," I said simply. "I wanted to tell you. That's all. We can talk about the details later."

He raised his eyebrows, with that slight widening of his eyes that was startlement for him.

_Did you really have to learn to make human expressions, like autistics do, Kal-El? _

_Or,_ I wondered for the first time, looking at the weariness and the slight shift of relief in his body, _is it that you had to learn to suppress them?_

So we stood there looking at each other with the rain falling between us. As he processed what I'd said. As I finally realized it was also possible this son of Krypton might feel today's weight _more_ deeply than the children of men. And as my shirt started to cling to my shoulders.

Then he took in the spreading wetness on my shoulders and my hair starting to cling together, even as his suit shed the droplets seamlessly. With just a shade of his old gleam in his eye, he held up one big hand, palm up to the raindrops, and said, "This once, would it be all right if I came in?"

I laughed, pulled open the patio door, and motioned him through.

I followed and pulled the door shut behind us. There in the sudden silence he looked around, curiously, at the kitchen and the den, and the doorways off to the bath and the bedroom. I was about to tell him to sit down, but then I waited, looking at the intrigued expression on his face as his glance moved around.

_How long has it been since you stepped into a home that wasn't on fire?_

He remembered himself and looked back at me, with the faintest flicker of embarrassment over his face.

I didn't know what else to say, so I said, "Please, sit. Do you want a towel?"

He shook his head. "Thank you. But _you_ need one, I think."

I got my dish towel in the kitchen and swiped at my shoulders and my hair. And then, because it seemed like the thing to do, I put water on to boil for tea, glancing back at the Lord of the Skies sitting on my old couch. Everything around him still looked smaller, less substantial, almost ghostly; dimmer, in the brilliance of his crest and his suit. And yet the weariness of him was almost palpable.

I came back and sat down across from him. And then I couldn't help myself any longer. "Kal," I said softly, "are you all right?"

He gave me a faint smile. "I'm fine. As much as you are, I think." Then he cocked his head. "But I'm surprised, I admit. Of all the six thousand shatterfall cultists in this country alone, I've never heard of one that turned."

I knew a bid for a change of subject when I heard one. Five years earlier, I would have pressed him, certain he should talk to me, certain I could help. It had taken a few interviews with shatterfall widows to teach me that pushing for the story was sometimes just repeating the violation.

So instead I said, "I don't think most of them are in this situation. Almost all of the shatterfall cults are all chant and no bite."

He raised his dark eyebrows. "Literally. Sometimes the sounds of their chanting fill my ears up, from six places at once, like rounds of the same melody." He hesitated. After a moment, he said pensively, half to himself, "I don't understand it."

Then he shook his head. "But you trust him? Did he join with this intention, at first, of breaking their plans?"

For a moment, my mind was still back on his last comment about not understanding. I was wondering how many human phenomena he found puzzling, how much _our_ thoughts looked alien and otherworldly to _him_.

Then I caught up again. "He's twenty-two. If that. He was young and hungry, and he thought the people who walked closest to death knew something about the meaning of it all. He learned better. I trust him."

And then, because it was going to have to come up anyway, I added, "And of course, I can't tell you who he is."

He looked back at me, for just a moment, like his old self with that dry gleam in his eye. And in that same deadpan voice - and it cheered me to hear it - he said, "Lois Lane, I wouldn't dream of asking an investigative journalist to turn over her source." He cocked his head. "We're both of us fairly bad Citizens, this night."

I laughed. "But _you'll_ have to work hard at not finding out. That hearing of yours is a curse, too."

The look that flashed over his face for just a moment was unmistakable.

_When they all scream together, you might just hear them._

_Oh, damn. Lane, you social elephant, you idiot._

"God," I said involuntarily, my good intentions of leaving him his privacy forgotten. "I'm so sorry."

He shook his head. "For what, Lois?" He looked up at me, his eyes unreadable. The storm flashed silently behind him, raindrops gleaming on the window in the lightning. Then, without pausing long enough to pretend he didn't know, he said, "When? Where?"

"The King Street stop, on the red line. Five-thirty in the afternoon."

"Rush hour."

"And they can't know you knew."

He shook his head. "That's the easy part. Informally, from what I've seen, fewer than half of fallbaits even succeed. All that matters is my staying close enough to hear. Then I can evacuate in the usual way."

We looked at each other across my coffee table, there in the light of my two little floor lamps. He was the first one to say what we were both thinking.

"If this works, we can do it again. And again."

"Carefully."

"I can let some of them succeed, in empty places."

"We're both felons, you know." It was strange hearing myself say it aloud. But it didn't, somehow, chill me the way it had before.

His eyes twinkled. "Does this affect your profound loyalty to the judicial system?"

There in the gathering dark, I laughed out loud. "I don't feel _anything_ for the legislative system. It's a bad, bad law."

The kettle whistled. I got up and poured us each a cup, boiling over the teabags. "One teaspoon of sugar? Or two?"

He hesitated just a moment. "Whatever you're having."

Maybe, before the rationing, his human family were coffee drinkers.

I gave us each a teaspoon and brought them back, and set his down in front of him. He watched its amber depths darken, silent.

And whether it was that he didn't seem in a rush to leave this time, or because I was backsliding to the old thought that I could fix anything, or because I just couldn't take it anymore, I opened my mouth again. "We talked about Montana all day long. Not a one of us blamed you." I tried to smile. "And _that_ was a room full of reporters."

To my surprise, he looked up and gave me his first, small smile. "Thank you." We looked at each other for a moment over our teas; _stop now, Lois, don't push him,_ I was thinking.

Then he added, "But that's a shame in its own way. Don't you think?"

I blinked. After a moment, I said softly, "A damn shame." I sighed. "But _our_ shame, not yours."

And then, guided by some half-blind intuition that he ought to have an out now if he wanted it, I added, "You really think it's less than half? The arrest rates for attempted fallbaiting make it look higher."

He looked up at me, with something like gratitude. And then he answered. "On the same night one fallbait arrest is made, I'll find two or three devices of the same make elsewhere in the city, that no shatterfall came to. It's not evidence, legally."

"No," I agreed. "But it's interesting."

He picked up his teacup carefully. I was about to warn him to let it cool, and then I realized how ridiculous that was. And then he set it to his lips.

The next moment he dropped it away; he set it back down.

I blinked. "_Two_ teaspoons after all, maybe?"

Kal looked up at me, his eyes glittering in my lamplight, strangely still. I felt the moment change, our tenuous mutual understanding broken, the sudden tension in him. I cocked my head, puzzled, looking back down at the teacup.

And then, the same moment he made a small sigh of decision, it dawned on me.

"Nothing's wrong with the tea, Lois," he said softly. "It's just that it's a little hot for me right now."

There in that frozen moment, I think I stared at him for a long while, and started nodding slowly. Most of my mind was reeling back down the day, as it changed in this new light; a small part was looking him over again. This time, for cuts or bruises.

He wasn't invulnerable.

And I was suddenly positive that, however it had happened, when he made his press statement today, he'd been about as capable of flight as I was.

"You didn't _refuse_ to bargain," I said softly. "You couldn't."

He gave me that little half-smile. "I was gripping the podium to stay on my feet." And then, quickly, he added, "It'll all be back tomorrow. It never lasts long."

I felt a surge of anger. "Kryptonite?"

He nodded.

"_Who did this to you?"_

Kal shook his head. He was silent for a long moment while I stared at him, reworking all my memories of that day. Was flight the first thing to come back? Was immunity the last? Had his hearing come back in time for him to catch the screaming?

Who had _dared_?

Finally, slowly, he said, "You need to know this, if we're going to make this work. But it's dangerous, and secret, and you'll have to keep it close."

_I don't really publish news anymore_, I thought irrelevantly as I waved him to continue. _I just find things out, and then keep them to myself. Saves on ink._

"It was…voluntary."

I blinked.

He sighed. "It makes my body more amenable to study."

I sat back on the couch, looking him over, wondering at it. I had images of needles, knives, biopsies, scans. There must be a hundred hundred secrets in his body that would be wonders for medical science.

But for which of them would he commit to being helpless for a day at a time?

"To what purpose?" I said softly.

"My hearing," he answered simply. "No constructed device in all the world can hear a coming shatterfall."

And he couldn't be everywhere at once.

"No," I murmured. "They'd need about five just like you."

He looked up at me sharply. "_That's_ a line of conversation," he said with deceptive mildness, "I've been trying to discourage."

My mind filled with science-fiction visions of clones. Or just clones of ears? I shook my head violently. And then I looked back up at him and shook my head more slowly, processing it all. Too much revelation, too many layers in the world, too much on the shoulders of one quiet hero who didn't know how he took his tea.

After a long moment I said the only thing I could think of to say. "My God." I reached for his tea and blew on it, watching the dark ripples lap against the far side of the cup. "I truly, completely, don't want to live your life."

He gave me that tentative upturn of his lips again. "But it's not a bad idea, Lois. It could change everything, if they succeed. It hasn't yet. But it could." He paused. "But what _you_ need to know is that there will be these… times again. I'll need as much notice as possible, to schedule them around your leads."

I nodded.

And then, of course, he stood and said softly, "I should go."

I remembered, belatedly, the few hours' grace he had wanted before we started. And it occurred to me suddenly to wonder if maybe he had another bright kitchen he was headed to, in that one blessed town or city that had watched over his childhood, to drink maybe coffee, and maybe pour his heart out. I built such a warm and comforting vision of it that it seemed natural to say, as I followed him to the balcony door, "Do you go home, after…things like this?"

He looked at me, so startled that I think the lostness I saw in his eyes crept out before he caught it. The next moment, he was back in control. "Sometimes."

Then, realizing, I think, how short it sounded, he went on, with what sounded like the first thing that occurred to him. "Sometimes, to the Fortress. It's… uniquely helpful."

I was suddenly sure of two more things. First, that home, whatever it was, wasn't the cheery haven I had pictured. And second, that whatever alien thoughts worked through his mind, that careful heart felt too, too many of the same things we did.

"I'm sorry to have burdened you with this," I said finally. "It's all too much. I know that. But…" I trailed off, helplessly. There was no 'but'. Things were what they were.

He shook his head. "Don't be." He looked up at me and said softly, gently, "If anything, it's probably what I needed. And if anything, I'm grateful."

He let himself out and stepped over the threshold. The rain had stopped as quickly as it had started; the air was thick and misty. "Be safe, Lois," he said over his shoulder. "We'll make this work. And things will get better."

I smiled; I almost clasped his shoulder, and then thought better of it. "Be safe," I echoed. And he was gone.

And the next day things went beautifully. They did manage to call a shatterfall; he'd been evacuating in Katmandu a few minutes before, and would have missed it. I realized, when I saw J.J. that night, that I'd never seen him happy before that moment.

We had three in the next month, and four the month after that, and then the months all rolled together. "Tell J.J.," Kal once said, and then visibly caught himself, with that sly look in his eye, none of it an accident. "Tell your _source_, I mean, that he saved his hundredth life today. His name is Garrett. He'll be twelve next week." Because J.J., bless his brave, paranoid heart, still wouldn't meet him in person.

We talked all those nights for all those months, Kal-El and I, about how to make each interception look like an accident. And about the one grim second of silence that Kal always heard fall, between a shatterfall's whine and its final coming; and what it might mean. And, once in a while, about the chill beauty of that Fortress, that last memorial to a home he'd never seen, rising up alone out of a flat white land. We speculated to each other about the leadership of Shatterfall cults, and we argued about which rights were still inalienable.

I had thought I was content before. But as those months passed and we all lit up with hope again, I started to want more than I ever had before. I wanted to lay open the fallbait cults, to bring down their treacherous ranks beyond rebuilding, to make them pay their dues to the unforgotten dead. I wanted to learn how we'd have to change, as a people, to get back freedom and safety, both together.

And I wanted to be the best poor friend I could to the Man of Steel, who deserved so much more of so many things; who no doubt deserved things we didn't have words for, that no longer existed, blown to dust in his world's destruction. To understand as much of his different mind as I could, and accept the part that I couldn't.

Partly, because that momentary lostness in his eyes made me think _some_ part of him might be glad for it. And partly because, after all, we were felons together.

"_Boyish face" and "supple skin" quotes stolen shamelessly from The Mailinator FAQ. _


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Cramming the necessary quantity of plot into the key scenes here was beyond difficult. Again, comments on how well the exposition elements hold attention, and whether the relationship elements ring true, would be much appreciated.

"The thing about investigative news, Lois," Perry told me in my first month at the _Planet_, "is this. It's merciless on your moods. You don't control a moment of the day. You have to be single-minded at unhealthy times. You need to be a bit inhuman, really."

He was trying, at the time, to talk me out of it.

Perry himself had come up the ladder from International, and was sure I would love it, the pomp and color and glory of it, if I gave it the chance. And that I'd wither away in the solitary 3 a.m.'s and dripping alleyways of Investigative.

"But I had it backwards, didn't I, Lane?" he admitted later, one night around my kitchen table, while he beat Jimmy and me at poker. "Because for you, it's the glory and excitement you just endure. And those dark bookstacks and alleyways that you're made for." He looked up at me, over the next hand that was going to wipe us out. "More like the General every day."

Which was a ridiculous thing to call a career Army chaplain, who had fought all his battles for souls, over midnight cups of coffee at other men's kitchen tables. But over twenty years of their friendship, and across twenty countries, Dad had never been able to break him of calling him that.

What Perry had first said about Investigative, I thought of often in the months after J.J.'s breakthrough. Because it was _far_ more true of felony. He was waking me with his latest break at 3 A.M. far more often than journalism ever had.

"Thanks again, J.J.," I would mumble, steeling myself to throw the covers back. "I'm _definitely_ turning you in this time." And then the next thing I knew, I'd be out on my balcony, cinching up my bathrobe, muttering savagely to myself, and then turning my eyes to the sky. "Kal, if you're up, I've got another one."

Swift, quiet and always ready, _he_ never seemed to have been sleeping. "I do sleep, though, Lois," he assured me once, as my bleary eyes met his still, dark ones in silent mutual amusement, over tea with two sugars. "Though sometimes I question whether your source does."

Every once in a while, we would talk about how the research was going. It was always the same. "Some interesting basic science has come out of it. Nothing useful yet." If he'd been testing that day, he moved a little stiffly. Once or twice, I'd see that telltale little tremble of his hand, on the balcony rail or the mug handle, and wonder what exactly he'd been sitting still for, an hour ago.

As disorienting as J.J.'s early morning calls were, at least they were easy to keep secret. It was the urgent afternoon calls that sent me to the roof of the _Planet _high-rise that were worrisome. Kal would circle for a bit overhead, as if flying patrol, before dropping to the rooftop with artful carelessness. I stood well back from the edge, where I couldn't be seen from the street, and gave him a rueful smile.

"Lois," he said by way of greeting one day, folding his arms across his brilliant crest, "we have to find another way. Three separate groups of people could come after you for this. I'm not even sure which would be worst."

"The feds, and the fallbait cults," I counted off, leaning back against the concrete stairway wall. "Who's the third?"

"My own enemies," he replied grimly. He looked down at me, his flawless face perfectly solemn, with a sudden gleam of black humor in his eyes. "The ones, you may recall, that are now out on parole."

I laughed and folded my arms behind my head, as he turned to look out over the rooftops with me. Then I sighed and rubbed my eyes. "Seven-thirty tonight. One of the West Side tenements."

Kal looked back at me sharply, his amusement forgotten, with a flash of the same disgust I'd seen in his eyes that first moment we met. "Children and single mothers. Who profits? Are their leaders as mad as their followers?"

I shook my head. My own increasingly obsessive work on the fallbait cults was leading me farther from all the standard reasons to explain their hits. The poor worldwide got the brunt, but never all, of the blows. Here, in the multiracial stew of Metropolis, no groups were singled out. There wasn't a clear pattern. But it didn't have the flailing, hysterical feel of true randomness to me, either.

And I was about to say something to that effect, when his head snapped up, and he turned it to peer into the concrete. His eyes took on that glassy glimmer of his deep vision. "Someone's coming. Middle-aged, in suspenders. He's three floors down."

I sighed. "Perry. He thinks I'm having a closet relapse, coming up here to smoke."

I looked up at Kal; the anger in his dark eyes had simmered back down. There was a mild curiosity there, as he glanced down at me and then back through the walls, and didn't move to take flight right away.

I looked at him for a long moment. Then, on an impulse, I said, "He's _much_ less confrontational than me. You'd like him."

The Man of Steel looked back down at me, with that hardly-perceptible amusement. In those long lamplit nights of planning interventions, he'd heard me mention the _Planet_ staff time and again. Eventually, he'd asked me about them. And he had listened, with either real curiosity or truly excessive courtesy, to Jimmy's and Perry's stories. He was fascinated, especially, by Perry's battles with the powers for the soul of his paper in his graying middle age. He looked back up through the wall.

"I already like him," he said finally. He gave me a faint half-smile, with just a shade of apology. "Good night, Lois. Thank you, again." And then he was gone, as the door swung in, and I shook my head and turned to go down with Perry.

The rest of the time, I was so wrapped up in the story of the cults, I almost forgot there had been shatterfalls before them.

They were getting more explicit, and more public, about their beliefs. And among all their different flavors and degrees of pessimism, the same themes cropped up again and again. It was mostly pseudobiblical stuff about the coming harvest, and how those who hoped and waited for it would be spared, when the stubble was burned and the old world ended. If he'd lived to see it, Dad would have had seizures.

"It's more than a little creepy," I mentioned to Kal, out of nowhere, one of those late nights or early mornings. "The part about praying for the coming of the final Shatterfall."

He looked up from his tea at me, a little surprised. Then he looked pensive for a moment. "Like the folktales," he said finally, "in which the vampire can't cross the threshold, until it's invited in."

_Yes_, I thought, a little surprised myself_. Exactly like that_.

"No, Lois," J.J. disagreed cheerfully, when I mentioned that bit of dogma to him too, later on. "What's creepy is the place in hell they have reserved for guys like me."

We never needed much in the way of notice from him on a new fallbait; a few hours, for the Man of Steel to get his flight and hearing back, assuming the worst. And thanks to J.J.'s unresting skittering among the video feeds, his spiderlike sensitivity to the trembles of his borrowed web, we always had that.

And then, one day, we didn't.

J.J. had gone to one of their retreats. "I'll get the President's autograph for you there, Lois," he said blithely in one of our alleys on his way out, with the orange slant of the afternoon sun lighting his face.

"If you can get through security at the world leaders' table," I agreed blandly, and he rolled his eyes at me and turned to go.

"J.J.," I said softly to his back, and he paused. "Be careful."

God forgive me – as if that empty, costless little gesture were enough, and so my duty to him was done.

He contacted me a couple of times in the next few days, about the eeriness of four hundred voices raised in shatterfall chants all together, about the weird luxury and wide green grounds of their nameless place, and the money it all spoke of.

And then I came out of a city council conference to check my messages, and found J.J.'s cell on my call list. I remember the noon sun making the marble steps of the council building dazzlingly bright, as I stood in the shadow of one of the columns and dialed in to voice mail.

"Lois," the little earpiece hissed out, "it's Christmas in June."

The Christmas Day Montana massacre. My chest tightened.

"Six Mile, Colorado. Damn fools, trying it again, _what's different this time_?"

_Does he know this line's safe? Does he know who's been spying? Why do it this way? Unless…_

"Lois, this one's live. Goddamit, Lois, come on,_ where are you?_" There was a thump in the background, with his swearing; I could almost see him slamming his hand against the wall. His voice shook at the end. "There's weird, weird stuff going on here. Call me back."

The time stamp was from twenty minutes ago.

I stood there a moment, thinking. And then I charged back in to the city council's office, and I made up something about my phone not getting service, to use their line to call him back. Of course, if anyone was watching his cell, the cat was well and truly out already.

No answer.

I barreled outside again, looking around ludicrously, there in the public square of Metropolis, for a private place to call for Superman. And then I thought, _hell with it_, and ducked back behind one of the columns.

"Kal," I whispered, up into the marble vaults of the entrance. "I need you. _Now_."

Silence.

"Six Mile, Colorado. They're going to try to bargain with you again. Now. I mean, now, they're trying it now!"

Nothing; the trees waved in the sun. In the cool stone shade of the building, I took a deep breath.

"Help, Superman!"

People halfway in and out of the building stopped to look at me; hot dog vendors at the base of the steps, a couple of passersby in business suits.

"Superman, help!"

"Ma'am," said one of the guards at the entrance, "what seems to be the problem?" She had that careful, neutral, nonthreatening tone one uses with the hysterical.

I turned and looked back at her, a stocky little woman in her officer's blue. And I've never, God help me, felt so doomed and so wrong already _before_ choosing, knowing nothing, nothing I could do now would be right.

Because there were three beat cops in J.J.'s cell alone.

"He's not coming," I said softly, half to myself. "Is he?"

I don't know what she saw in my eyes. But as we looked at each other, hers widened a bit, and that careful air of harmlessness fell away. "Ma'am," she said back slowly, in a very different tone, reaching down for her intercom, "do you need to speak to my Chief?"

And so, of course, that's what I did.

I knew Chief Henderson. Not as well as I wished I did, in that moment. But as far as I knew him, I trusted him, and the skies were empty.

I told him what was coming. When we got in to the station, I dodged the source identity question at first, and in those first frantic moments, no one pursued it. And then I looked out from the chief's office, at the great G.M.P.D. machinery coming to life around me.

In those first moments I didn't call Perry. I was trying, there at Henderson's desk, in the scattered moments he was called away from taking my statement, to pull together the pieces that might help them find J.J.

If not today, or tomorrow, I'd be in prison by the end of the month, regardless. But right now I had everyone's ear. Right now, if I did it right, could I give them enough to launch a raid on the retreat, to bring J.J. home before his friends turned round on him like wolves?

Henderson knew there was more than I was telling. He kept glancing back at me from the chaos of the station_. And you'll get what you want, _I thought grimly_. Just give me a minute, just a minute, to pull it together._

"Lois?"

Perry, grave and desolate in the doorway, had apparently found me anyway.

I stood, relieved and terrified, feeling sick. Having him there made it real. It was the moment this began to tip over, spill down and stain everything. I'd thought I might have a few hours before it happened.

"Perry –" I started. And then stopped, as he put his finger to his lips, crossed the room in three steps, and threw his arms around me.

"Just heard from a friend of yours," he whispered in my ear, patting my back. His voice was shaking, like mine felt in my throat. "Give them the anonymous caller story. Is it too late?"

I shook my head against him; I was shaking. "Almost, it was."

"Tell me what he needs to know to find your source."

I closed my eyes. "God, Perry, I'm so sorry."

"Not now, honey," he muttered back. "No time."

I swallowed. "Good weather. Hilly land, a five-hour drive from the city in a cargo van. One drawbridge toward the end, then a gravel road. Big grounds, and the mansion is stone. J.J's a skinny little blond kid, with blue eyes." I squeezed my eyes shut. "And terrible hair."

Perry breathed out, tightened his arms around me, and then let go and stepped back. "Don't worry, Lane," he said aloud. "They've got it all under control. I'm going to go call Lucy for you."

He gave me a little half-smile as he left; I didn't even try to return it.

_Oh, God of my father, bring that boy back safely. Please._

In Colorado, the Six Mile P.D. first took to the streets with their sirens flashing, looking for God knew what. There were reports of guerrilla scuffles on the corners. The National Guard arrived, and then there was exchange of gunfire. By the end of the day, six national guard units had pinned down a little fifty-man army. If the plan had been to take the whole village, J.J. had saved five hundred and sixty lives.

Meanwhile, it took less than an hour for one faithful friend to carry my message, and another, trembling with kryptonite sickness, nearly falling from the air, to find the mansion.

And there, searching the halls and great rooms, he found food for an army, and a high-vaulted chapel full of recording equipment and tapes of the shatterfall chant. And not one of those five hundred foot soldiers who had come there for their faith was anywhere.

The police and the press were close behind him. I knew Kal had found nothing before I got home from the station. I wondered, dully, which of the companies of heroes – which P.D., or the National Guard - held the leak that had warned the organizers they had a turncoat.

Jimmy walked me home. He knew, I think, just enough not to ask questions. "Don't ever be a hero, Jimmy," I told him at the door, taking his shoulders, turning him to face me. "I couldn't take it." My throat was tight, but tears have never come easily for me; my body never seems to know when the crisis is over.

But Jimmy had tears in his eyes for us both. As he stood there in my grip, so fragile, like another sweet and frightened boy, he whispered back, "Don't worry, Lois. I won't." He looked down for a moment at the ground, poor man. How deeply had all this going over his head shaken him, and how would it touch his heart from now? "I don't think it's really in me, anyway," he added softly.

"I hope not," I answered. "Go home. It's almost curfew." He hesitated, looking back at me. "Go home, Jimmy. I'm not fit for company now. Go." He looked at me for another minute, his eyes bright with unshed tears in the stuttering hall light, and then decided that I meant it.

I lay down on the bed with the light off for a moment, looking up at the ceiling. My stomach was sick, or hungry; I couldn't tell.

_Does anyone ever keep five hundred prisoners for long? _

_Don't be brave any more, J.J. Answer their questions. Tell them everything._

Then I swung my legs over the edge and booted up my laptop. What did I have to work with? A year of sociological reflections on the seduction methods of shatterfall cults. Enough evidence, from the clips J.J. had given me, to get maybe twenty peons arrested. The names of a few more important members, wirth no evidence at all - I could make a public scandal, but not a sting. It still wasn't illegal to belong, if there was no evidence you knew your cell was involved with fallbaiting.

But I had a location, now. Property records, I could start querying from here. In the morning I could get Jimmy to hound G.M.P.D. about fingerprinting results. I might have as much as a month before the feds came after me. Maybe he was still alive, maybe he was -

_Don't be a child, Lane. You know what they do. Just let them have done it quickly. Let them not feel the need to make an example of him._

And then, alone with myself, I couldn't put if off any more. I laid my head in my hands and faced the truth.

_No, let me go back, and not have sent him off into battle a hundred times this year, with a pat on the back. "Be careful, J.J." _

_What was his full name, anyway? _ I closed my eyes, sickened. I wasn't sure.

I shook my head and tried to get back to my data mining. If by some miracle of their foolishness he was still alive – _stop it, Lane, you coward_- it was all I could do for him. I sent off queries to all my web of underground contacts, each in his own code. First to the ones that could plausibly help, then to the ones that couldn't.

Someone fearless in the internet press had gotten hold of the last few moments of the shatterfall chant from the mansion, before the tapes were taken into custody and classified.

"We have our guidance now," said someone, edgy with some tension of ecstasy, or anger. "The world is still waiting for the day. But for us, the day is now." Bodies shifted and people murmured in the background. "All of us will be sifted. But only one of us has reason to fear."

That was where the tape was stopped.

Mass suicide? But who moved the bodies? Or, where did they go to die? How did they get there, by no path that left a scent, or a heat signature?

No doubt, the same way four hundred Montana hostages disappeared, and were never found.

_What's 'creepy' is the place in hell they have reserved for guys like me._

I took a deep breath, went back to the bed, and looked at the floor, my head pounding.

_Oh, J.J. I'm so sorry. _

"Lois?"

Kal was framed in the bedroom doorway, backlit by my hall light, motionless.

The humid night air drafted in from behind him, with the warm pine smell of the woods. I turned in my chair, arms around my knees, and looked back at him, silent. It wasn't dark in the room, to his eyes. He'd see the redness in mine, and the lack of tear tracks.

"I knocked," he said, with an odd note of contrition in his voice. "But your heart was beating so fast. And my deep vision's still out. And after everything today…" He sighed. "I'll fix your door, I promise."

I gave him a ragged laugh, wondering how many doors torn off their hinges were a fit payment for a boy's life.

"Come and sit down," I said finally. "You must be sick as hell." I rubbed my eyes and reached for the bedside lamp, and the little knob slipped through my fingers; it took me three tries to turn it on. I hadn't realized my palms were sweating. "Thank you for trying so hard."

He gave me a soft laugh, as he sat himself beside me. Under his full weight, the bedside dipped and creaked. "I'm sorry about bringing Perry White into it. That was no favor to him." He paused. "But my going to the station would have turned _every_ eye on you."

I shook my head. "No. You were right, the way you did it. You've bought me at least a month. I think. I hope." I closed my eyes. "You don't think the feds will go after Perry, when they come for me?"

Kal looked over at me sharply for a moment, his dark eyes startled. Then he sighed. "No one's coming for you, Lois. Or for Perry White."

I opened my mouth to tell him he was being sweet, and naïve. And then I closed it again. A man who could get criminals sentenced to the fullest stretch of the law might just be able to turn the hounds aside as well.

Deep in the spread of that desolation, I felt a little stab of hope and relief. Maybe, maybe, I wasn't going to jail.

And then I thought of J.J., and hated myself. I buried my head in my hands.

Kal watched me wordlessly. The grief in his eyes answered mine. I wondered how God made us able to show such things, how they could be written on flesh and matter.

"You know, of course," he said softly, "that his cover was most likely broken as soon as he called you. It's unlikely any decision you made afterwards mattered, even if you'd had a choice. If I'd been whole again sooner, maybe. But I think he knew what he was doing when he did it."

As far as that went, it was true. But it was too simple. And I had had just the bitter foretaste of the shame I deserved. It was too soon for understanding, much too soon for forgiveness. The last thing I wanted was to feel better. It would be the last slap in the face of that skinny young man who might be dying by torture.

I looked up at him, at the lamplight shadows moving over his almost-human face as he spoke. I was too tired to say anything but the truth. "He was twenty-two. The biggest choice he'd ever made was between Harvard and U of Met." I turned, cross-legged on the bedside, facing him. "It wasn't today that I killed him."

Kal blinked, and looked at me for a long moment. I read there in his eyes the dawning of a too-perfect understanding. "Oh," he said softly, after a moment. "I see."

_Do you?_ some part of me thought irrelevantly. _Maybe you do. _

_Was it you alone, who decided to go out to save the world at seventeen? Or did someone look into the eyes of the brave, frightened boy you were then, and send you on your way with a pat on the shoulder, saying,"Oh, and be careful!"_

_Because I'd like to kill him. Or her._

"If there's any truth in that, Lois," he said finally, "I'd seen far more of their…capabilities than you ever did. We can carry that burden together."

I felt one tear gather, hot, in the corner of my eye, and track slowly down my cheek. I used to hate crying in front of people. It's laughable, what you think is shameful, till you have something to be truly ashamed of. But I did close my eyes, because the heat of the tears hurt. And after a moment, I felt him reach out and gather me in to his side.

The mass of his chest and arm was heavy and solid; he was fever-hot through the suit. I could feel the carefulness in his grip, and the faint after-trembles from that damned mineral that had never brought anyone any good. I wondered briefly if this was unnatural for him, if he'd had to learn that we took comfort from it, from a thousand thousand weeping survivors.

_And if so, then thank you, at least, for trying. _

"I love your heart, Kal," I said softly after a moment. "But it's not time for comfort yet, really. "

He gave an answering humorless chuckle. "The best I had hoped for," he agreed, his chest rumbling against my cheek, "was agreement in grief. Even," he added more quietly, "grief over things it would be even worse to go back and change."

I nodded my head against him. _Those, especially._

I felt the slight shift of his balance, as he lifted his head and looked over me at my monitor. "Lois," he said after a moment, "were you thinking you might still find him?"

I blinked my eyes open and wiped the sitting tears away so I could see, and followed his gaze to the sites open there. No messages in my inbox.

I sighed; he dropped his arm and turned to look down at me. I looked back at the sorrow and hesitation in his eyes, watched him warring over how and whether to tell me I was wasting my time.

Had I really absorbed the language of his face so thoroughly, that it was all so clear now? Or was he, this one moment, really that unguarded?

"No," I answered, simply, to spare him making up his mind.

"But the thing is," I said after a moment, "that there might really be enough here, now, to act on, to bring them down."

He cocked his head and studied me for a long moment, more directly than before. "Do you need help?" he said finally. "Or do you need to _not_ have help?"

I gave him a little half-smile. "It's not revenge, Kal. I don't need to pull the trigger." I leaned back on my hands behind me. "But it's all dark bookstacks and dripping alleyways. I think it's my world, not yours."

I shook my head, wishing it would stop pounding. I was wishing I could be for just another day the twentysomething I'd been five years ago, shining like a blade with a single purpose. For just a couple of days, long enough to finish J.J.'s work for him. Then I'd do all my penance, uncomplaining, knowing it was nothing like enough.

As if he heard half my thoughts, Kal rose from the bed and turned to face me as I sat on the edge. "Lois," he said quietly, "what _is_ it you need, now?"

_Within the realm of possibility?_ I sighed. "A little borrowed time. A little peace. Focus." I thought of Perry, over the card table. "The thing about investigative news is, you need to be a bit inhuman to do it well."

He closed his eyes for a long moment, as if I'd said more than I meant to. I watched a strange, quiet tension build in him, that perfect stillness he fell into when he was weighing a hundred hundred issues at once. I wondered distantly what it was this time that he was trying to decide if he should tell me. And how many more secrets there were, and whether it mattered.

Then he looked back down at me. He took a breath. "Will you come with me? There's something I want to show you. I think, maybe, it will help."

I looked at him, standing in my room in the silent absoluteness of his glory, my gentle-hearted friend. "Help me think? Or sleep?"

"Both. And help you sleep, so you can think."

I cocked my head at him, thinking of a conversation on a different night, about where he went after things went badly.

_Sometimes, to the Fortress. It's uniquely helpful._

I glanced back over at my laptop, checking patiently every five minutes for a hundred replies that might or might not come. It was one in the morning.

I looked back at him. "Okay."

He nodded. "You'll need a night bag."

I blinked.

"You'll be back by morning."

It was too late, and I was too tired and empty, to be very curious. I packed my satchel.

My balcony door was off its hinges, leaned up against the wall. One of its glass panels was cracked. That, I really didn't care about.

Out on the balcony, he took my satchel. "You're ready?"

I nodded. With the quiet matter-of-factness of one who had done it a thousand times, he stooped, one arm behind my back, and lifted the other behind my knees, raising me into his arms. "All right?"

I nodded. I wrapped my arms around his neck, there in the heat and stone strength of his body, thinking what a comfort that would be for a child's fear or a child's grief, something simple and guiltless. _J.J., God, I'm so sorry._

His acceleration was smooth. There was only the warm wind, and the city dropped away below us. The lights were clustered and patchy, with great clumps of darkness between them. I wondered how the world had changed beneath him over the last fifteen years, the jeweled glory of the cities stuttering out bit by unrebuilt bit.

Those nameless cities bloomed, sped by in the distance, and dropped away behind us. After them came the dim quicksilver gleam of moonlight on the sea beneath us. And then sometime later, in a flicker, it all became white ice, stretched out flat below us to the horizon.

And then the Fortress sprang into life below us as its master approached, light flaring in the crystal walls that rose up sheer from the flat land.

The first thing I ever felt toward that nonhuman marvel, that last artifact of a race, wasn't awe. It was gratitude. Because the moment we stepped through the threshold, I realized why he'd brought me.

Like a switch had been flipped, the incoherent moan of my heart fell silent.

There was only calm, the relief of pain, and lucid quiet. I closed my eyes. I breathed. I stood, afraid to move for a moment, to do anything to jar it.

Behind me, Kal said, "It's all right, Lois."

I turned to face him, and saw the understanding in his eyes. "It's the same everywhere within the walls. You can explore, if you want to."

I looked at him for a long moment, as it sank in. He guessed my next thought. "And it's only temporary."

I gave him a little half-smile, at that.

"Go on."

I turned back to the Fortress and started forward, aimlessly, stretching my legs in this too-profound gift, this safe space. I tried to call up the same sickening chaos of the heart that I'd felt an hour ago, and couldn't. Just peace, and clarity.

He stayed back, moved, I think, by that same sense of privacy that had once made me step back after unmasking his childhood to his face.

_Can't stay here long_, I thought, as I passed by the dim doorways ringed around the great room to other otherworldly chambers. As my eyes and fingers traveled over things like consoles and screens, all of them dozing, waiting for his touch to wake them.

I noted, clinically, that there were keypads with forty-two symbol keys each. Written Kryptonian seemed to be a phonetic language like the English, not character-based like the Chinese. _And his organs of communication are human, essentially…could a human pronounce this language? Could it be so difficult to make a translation?_

I shook my head, surprised by the sudden cerebral agility of my thoughts here. I was momentarily ashamed by the clinical, academic tangent they had taken.

_But then, it's the Fortress working, isn't it?_

_But not for long, J.J. I promise. Just long enough to bring them down. To find you, if you were still alive._

In the center of the great hall was a glassy chamber, clear and rectangular, about the size to hold a man, its door hanging open. I stepped closer, looking at the chaos of controls ringed around it, wondering what it was for.

"Lois," he said softly, coming forward. "Don't."

I looked back at him. Kal shook his head; he stepped, gently, between it and me. "That's the source of it; it diffuses out, to the rest of the Fortress, only if the door's open. As far as I can tell, _nothing_ enters or leaves that chamber, when it's closed." He folded his arms across his chest. "And I'm not sure what the full force of it would do to you."

I looked up at him. My head was clearer, cleaner, than it had ever been in my ace reporter days. "Do you know how it works?"

Kal looked up, around the crystalline walls of this half-organic artifact of his race. "Only partially." He glanced back down at me, as if deciding whether to say something else. And then decided not to.

_And I'll be curious what it was. When this wears off._

"Did you find the Fortress this way, at first?"

He gave me a minimal, rueful smile; he stepped back away from it and gestured for me to follow. As we stepped back to the hall's circumference, he shook his head. "The first time I came here, it was waiting to be told how to grow."

We stopped; he gestured me to sit, on one of the crystalline outcroppings of this strange home that was never made for furniture. Kal looked down at me, his dark eyes grave but calm in this alien air, clear of the rawness of grief I had seen there an hour ago. I wondered for the first time how often he had to come here.

"I was young," he said softly. "I'm grateful now that the best answer was clear even then. I could so easily have wound up with…a nerve center, from which to rule Earth. Or some other monstrosity."

_A Fortress of Power, maybe, instead of Solitude_. And as if from a distance, I noted the shade of fear in his voice, that followed him even here. Fear, by the sound of it, very nearly of himself.

I tilted my head. "What, exactly, _did_ you ask it for?"

He was silent for a moment, as if trying to remember, or possibly translate. Finally, he said, "A way to silence the cries of the heart."

_Yes_, I thought clinically. _That's it, exactly. _

Questions for another day came to my mind to be filed. _What was it exactly about the cries of the heart, that made you ask for that? _

_And is there an equalizing reaction, some chemical rebound, when the cries of the heart start up again? Or is that somehow contained here too? Chained in some metaphysical vault in the basement?_

_And, by the way, the density of information traffic it would take to carry the snooping J.J. stumbled on - it should stand out, by sheer volume, on the network records. It might be coded, piggybacked, and untraceable. But it would increase the average connection time for users on the same satellite. I could find them that way._

_And, I'm exhausted._

I looked back up at him. "How long does it last, this effect?"

Kal turned and sat beside me, a few feet away, smoothing his cape beneath him. He looked back at me, with a distant irony twinkling in his eye. "It's not unlike kryptonite."

I blinked.

"The duration of exposure determines the duration of response."

I laughed a little, looking across at my little satchel - a beat-up, worn-out little bag on the white crystalline glory of the Fortress floor. "Thus the overnight bag."

Kal glanced back too, and then back at me. He stood again, and stepped back away from me, with that same curious gentleness in his eyes. He picked up my bag and held it out to me; I took it from his hands. He gestured behind me, to one dim doorway that looked just like all the others.

"Go to bed, Lois," he said softly. "Sleep here tonight." He glanced back at the chamber that was the fountain of it all, and then back at me. "You'll have one, maybe two, days before it all comes back. Bring down the men who killed your source, and then begin your grieving."

I nodded slowly. I felt, without thinking, that I might just be able to do that.

What sort of bed did a child of Krypton sleep in? But then, he'd have thought of that as well.

I looked back up at him. "Thank you." I hesitated just a moment. "You'll be here?"

"I'll be right outside. If I leave, it won't be long." He almost clasped my shoulder, and then thought better of it and dropped his hand. "Go on."

And I did. Crawling between sheets that were smoother than mine, but warmer than silk, I first thought I might lie awake for hours, staring up at refracted starlight through the translucent vault of the ceiling. Listening to the half-organic sounds of the Fortress around me, the movements of things deep inside it, I wondered if the place itself spoke the dead language of his people.

I think I was out the next minute. I don't know if he slept that night, or if he left, or how many times. I didn't dream.

The next morning I woke feeling twenty times stronger, my mind bright with clean white silence. I had thought of twelve separate next steps in sniffing down J.J's old cell.

He was there on one of the crystalline seats when I came out, bent over a book, with his back mostly turned to me. I watched him there for a moment.

Without turning, Kal said, "How do you feel?"

I came up behind him. The book was the _Institutes_, the masterwork of John Calvin, that sixteenth-century man of God who was the Reformation's mind and backbone, who had suffered, tortured, and ruled Geneva, all for the love of God.

Dad, a Wesleyan, always had an unreasonable hatred for that book. The doctrine of total depravity alone could set him off for hours. When I was back to normal, I'd probably think about that more.

"I want to stay," I said finally.

He turned his head to look at me, all his discipline back in place. But I knew better now than to think of it as coldness.

"I know," he said quietly. "But that's all the more reason to go."

I nodded. "I know."

At my balcony, he set me down and glanced behind me at the door, where a sheet of sunlight reflected off half that cracked glass panel.

"Don't," I said gently. "I think I might leave it."

He stepped back. "Call if you need me."

I nodded. "And I'll tell you when it's ready."

He crouched to go. All his strength was back; he looked a hundred times better than the night before.

I realized I'd been thinking of his cool discipline as something to be regretted. If not a sin, then at least a tragedy. But really, there was no begrudging him that silence of the heart, that gift of his Fortress. Most humans are born with that gift, of some numbness when it's needed. It was good, that there should be something for a man who wasn't.

Then he paused, and seemed to think for a moment.

"Lois," he said finally, "Don't rewrite the past completely."

I blinked.

"The risks you took, measured against _any_ standard but his, were enormous. He made most of his choices without your input. And I doubt he would undo them, if he could."

And then something else flashed for a moment in his eyes, and he added, "And he was, whatever you think, a man already when he met you."

_He was twenty-two,_ I thought irrelevantly. _Not, for example, seventeen._

More to think about, when my own heart woke, when it came time to face my own shame and sorrow. And eventually, farther down that road, to come to some peace, on some terms that would make J.J. proud. Softly, I answered, "Thank you, my friend."

One last thought occurred to me. "Kal," I said, as he crouched again. He stood and turned back to me.

"Yesterday, when they were at work on you."

He nodded.

"Did they find anything to copy, in your hearing? Is there any end to these sessions in sight?"

His face softened again for a moment. He took a breath. "In a manner of speaking."

I raised my eyebrows.

"It's clear, now, that it's not possible. It lies in structures too small – too _necessarily_ small – for me, or any means we have, to duplicate."

"Oh," I said dully. _In a day or two, that's _really_ going to hurt._

He hesitated again, searching my face. He closed his eyes, seeing, I think, our world spread out below him, in its patchy, crumbling glory.

"Don't worry, Lois," he said finally. "There may be another way. Bring down this cult, if you can. And I…I'll do what I can."

Another time, I doubt I would have left it there. But I let him go. Time enough to speculate, in a day or two. For now, there was work to be done, and quickly.

It took me two days exactly. And then the _Planet_ published the story of J.J.'s cult, both the ways they wooed their converts and the ways they made human sacrifice of strangers. And that many-rooted monster, the oldest, deepest fallbait cult on the East Coast, came crashing down like Satan out of heaven. I never found a trace of J.J. in any of their haunts.

That same day, our science page went public that the shatterfall destruction radii were shrinking, as their frequency increased. What _that_ might mean, of course, God only knew.

And in the months that followed, the long-rising swell of shatterfall cult popularity began finally, like a miracle, to turn. I don't know whether it had more to do with the damning story of the East Coast arm, or with seeing that the law could still bring them to their knees. But the way people talked about that path began to change. It started to look to me like we were still a clearer-headed people than I'd thought. J.J. would have been thrilled beyond words.

Because if our world was going to end in the Shatterfall, at least we weren't about to say we liked it.


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N: Very, very, very sorry for the delay. I need comments on more areas than I can name. But ideally, at least, I would love to hear any thoughts on what elements of the plot complexity work and don't, whether the transitions are believable or too abrupt, and whether the character interactions are believable. Whether this dialogue-oriented approach to moving the plot works, or is crying out for more fireballs and muscle-flexing. And, as always, whether the massive exposition volume holds interest. _

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A shatterfall slices the bonds that hold matter together.

Not all of them; just the high-energy bonds. This is why flesh gets the worst of it, wooden buildings start dripping out organic soup, and concrete is usually untouched.

I sometimes imagine the atoms like raw severed ends of the split molecules, as if they flailed around wildly, each looking for another end to cling to. When it finds one, their re-bonding gives off a burst of energy, and then it all settles back down – looking the same, but really very, _very_ different.

The microscopic fibrous networks that hold our tissues together are _not_ high-energy bonds. They endure, the string and gristle, while the rest of the body drips away.

Of course, people, per se, don't attract shatterfalls the way high-energy devices do. One has the sense we're just collateral damage. Meanwhile those devices, when the shatterfall hits them, suck down power ravenously for a moment, as if their resistance dropped to nothing. When the shatterfall ends, they usually catch fire.

And that, more or less, is all that was known, throughout the years of the cults' rise and fall.

Everyone knew what the whole picture _looked _like; it looked like someone was raiding energy, harvesting our world one perfect spoonful at a time. But no entity, and certainly no nation, was visibly benefiting. We'd been recycling the same conspiracy theories for two decades.

And so when we had learned the shatterfalls were shrinking, and accelerating, it was the first real new insight in over fifteen years. We treated it like historic news. Even though both were happening so slowly it made no practical difference at all.

And a year later, nothing more had come of it.

"We could do an anniversary edition," I told Perry around that time.

"You could put in a best-of selection from your death threats," he agreed grimly, without looking up from the piece he was dissecting.

I rolled my eyes. The threats from cultists had peaked at six or seven daily, when J.J.'s cell was in its death throes. Perry had reorganized and nearly doubled _Planet _security. At home, I had caved in and added motion sensors and window grating.

I had also seen one disproportionately long prison sentence come out of the last year's flurry of trials. Kal looked uncomfortable and changed the subject every time I brought it up.

Then, in the past couple of months, the threats had tapered down to one or two a week – the most dangerous time, Chief Henderson had called cheerfully to remind me a few days ago. The target starts getting careless, and the one guy in a hundred who meant what he wrote comes out of hiding.

"The eye-rolling, more than the threats, is what scares me," Perry said softly, without missing a beat in his redlining.

I laughed a little, because Dad would have been leaning forward on his elbows, fixing my eyes without blinking, but saying the exact same thing. I decided I should have more mercy on Perry than I'd usually had on Dad. "I'm not fifteen any more, Perry. I don't court trouble _just_ to vex people."

He did look up at that, and crossed his arms and leaned back in his creaking seat with a trace of a rueful smile. "I haven't accepted that you're _five_ yet. I keep expecting you to ask me to read _The Runaway Bunny_ over and over till your father gets back."

I laughed out loud. "And don't think I didn't notice how much shorter it got every time."

"Do your anniversary edition, and I'll read you the whole thing." We looked at each other with half-smiles for a moment.

Mine slipped first. Perry's was close behind. He knew as well as I did why I wanted an anniversary edition.

"Go ahead and dedicate it, if you want," he said more softly.

I sighed. "You don't think it'll look like the _Planet_ riding his coattails?"

He shook his head. "J.J. _is_ the _Planet, _to most people. No one thinks we have anything to prove on that count. And we owe it to him to be the first to remember."

So we were.

The rest of the time, I was splitting, between earning my keep and coming back over and over to the loose ends of the cults and their obsessions. Those traceless disappearances, that invisible command structure. I had never hit such a perfect smooth wall, such a sea to which all trails led and vanished.

My one amusement at work was the way Perry had started disappearing at lunchtime, skulking back in hours later. _Six years since the divorce_, I told Jimmy, _and he's finally hiding a girlfriend_.

Other than that - one year out, the shatterfalls still shrinking, their frequency still rising imperceptibly, and nothing else had changed.

"Though academically, it's still fascinating," Kal agreed that night on my balcony, with that gleam of good humor in his eye, when he stopped through for a moment between continents. There was soot on the brilliant blue of his suit again. He handed me the pound truffle box I'd asked him for, for Lucy's birthday, and folded his arms.

I looked at it in delight, and squeezed his arm as I took it from him. It would be Lucy's first chocolate in a year. International trade had been stripped down to the essentials, since cargo ship boiler rooms had started drawing shatterfalls.

"Maybe someday," he added, looking out over the woods, "That knowledge _will_ lead to more. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow."

"Oh?" I raised my eyebrows, while I laid the box inside and came back out. "They've found a way to inject you with it?"

He gave me a grave mock-wince for a moment, and then looked back at me with that twinkle in his eye, the only thing moving in the perfect massed stillness of the rest of him.

In truth, I'd only seen the kryptonite sickness in him a few times since that night a year ago, when they gave up on his hearing. Afterwards he had seemed subtly more relaxed, almost happy. At some point I had realized why: now that that angle of research had stopped, he no longer had to count the lives lost while he was earthbound.

God only knew what they were doing to him now instead.

As for him and me, J.J. had pulled us into the same slow current, and there we had stayed. We met at long intervals, at strange hours. We talked about the shifting almost-patterns of the shatterfalls, the ways our society had changed in reaction, our mutual unease with the feel of a silent hand behind the cults -something dormant but not beaten. There was something calming in his quiet goodness, at once wry and unconsciously lordly; in that gentle heart that accepted the madness and confusion of its adopted home without complaint.

We _didn't_ talk about his human family, or his old life among men. He never tried, on me, those smooth deflections he used for public questions about Krypton. But he was so palpably uncomfortable with the questions - in his own grave, minimal way – that I finally had pity on him and stopped asking. Afraid of dropping too many identifiers? Reluctant, to tell the secrets or the sins of others? Or his own? Or some private, unrelated thing incomprehensible to me? God only knew.

But I did know wordlessly, that night, that he had come by because he too remembered what had happened, a year ago tomorrow.

Kal turned and looked down at me. "What are _you_ working on now?"

I broke out of my reverie and leaned out over the balcony rail. "My latest is on recognizing the next-generation fallbait devices. Wishful thinking, really." The new ones he'd seen in Asia for the last month were small enough to palm, opening a new world of wicked concealment possibilities. They hadn't made it to the States. Yet.

"But it's good to keep _them_ nervous," he finished, and I nodded.

We were silent for a moment, listening to the crickets chirping. Then, abruptly, he looked down at me and said, "Lois? What do you know about Schrodinger's cat?"

I blinked. Twenty months ago, when I thought his reserve and pragmatism were flawless, his increasingly frequent non-sequiturs would have seemed utterly out of character. Lately, they just made me wonder how much else he didn't say. Whether he was thinking of a thousand things at once, or just unaccustomed to segues.

"The observer phenomenon? With the cat in the box, with the radioactive atom with a 50-50 chance of decaying?"

He nodded. "Have you come across it lately, at all?"

_In conversation? _ "Not since the science section ran that_ Quantum Physics for the Rest of Us_ series. Years ago." I looked back at him quizzically. "It doesn't come up much, Kal. Why?"

He raised his dark eyebrows. "Do you believe it?"

_Believe it?_ "The neither-dead-nor-alive-till-you-look-part?" I turned to look up at him properly. "What the hell kind of things _are_ they doing to you?"

Kal's lips twitched in a smile. "Nothing so permanent. But my lead investigator's background is in theoretical physics. _Now_ his work is all applied, of course. Most recently, for the hearing project. Apparently his first field dried up along with its funding, like the rest of theoretical science." There was an odd, almost wistful note in his voice. "But he talks about it. As if he can't stop, sometimes. And it's unsettling, the idea of it, don't you think?"

The need for an observer to cement an event. The true universe as a mirror-house of all things possible at once, a waveform blurred in its infinity, collapsing down into a single truth only when living eyes looked at it. And then blooming back out into that nest of probabilities in every closed and unwatched space, the moment we turned our backs.

It _was_ unsettling. But weirdly glorious, too, almost magical - that the world should seem to care if we watched it.

I hadn't really thought about it since college, but in that moment I felt a vague little pang myself for the far-away death of theoretical physics.

And for a very few people out there, like this poor second-career physicist friend of his, that was probably the worst blow the shatterfalls could have dealt them.

"Unsettling," I said finally, "that a mind could matter that way?"

"Exactly that," he agreed. "Giving shape to reality…is that a job you'd give most people you know? A job you'd trust yourself with?"

I laughed at that, a little. "Not for a minute." And then I wondered if that was really all he felt about it. "But you don't think it's beautiful, too?"

He was silent for a moment. When I glanced up he was looking down at me. He had that rare baffled, helpless look in his dark eyes, that always came when I'd nearly forgotten about it, and was gone again the next moment.

And then a much more familiar look overran it. He was suddenly hearing something far away and critical. He glanced up at the horizon, and then back down at me. "I'm sorry, Lois. It's Colorado Springs. There's a fall coming fast."

I shook my head. "Go." I gestured to the chocolate box. "Thank you. And Lucy thanks you."

As usual, he glanced back at that glass pane on the balcony door as he left, cracked from his old forced entry, but he'd learned better than to bring it up with me. I knew it was childish, but it seemed even worse to replace it just for history's sake, when otherwise it wouldn't have bothered me.

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The next morning Perry and I tried to wrestle the anniversary edition layout into place. The footage from Kal's Colorado Springs rescue was on mute in the background.

"Damn it, Lois! I said a dedication, not a biographical novel." Which it was almost a kindness to call the few paragraphs I'd put together on J.J. A biography would have involved at least an attempt to contact his family, which I'd never been able to bring myself to do. And his full name, which he'd evidently hated so much that none of his official documents listed it.

"I'll cut it to a half page, then. No less."

Onscreen on the replay, Kal had cleared the perimeter of the housing complex and was making his first dive in. He had so nearly made peace with the press that he barely glared at the camera at all.

"Brilliant. Maybe take out the three paragraphs you threw in as filler so you could finally bargain down to a _quarter_ page." Perry was visibly trying not to smile, out of the corner of my eye; then he followed my gaze back to the television.

We both watched in silence for a moment, though we'd seen it twice already that morning. In six seconds, Kal would give up on evacuating and lift the four-story building off its foundation, to set it down four blocks away.

"Lois," Perry said in a very different tone, "If it came while he was in there, what would happen to _him_?"

It _had_ happened. Twice that I knew of, and no doubt more. When I'd asked Kal about it, he'd gotten that involuntary lost look for a moment. _Worse than kryptonite?, _I'd asked after a moment. He'd smiled ruefully. _Shorter, though_, he'd replied, and changed the subject.

Aloud, I said, "I'm the expert?"

Perry rolled his eyes at me. I opened my mouth to make a smart remark about his own long lunch hours.

But then his face changed. His eyes shifted behind me to the doorway and his face went white.

I turned.

Three men in dark suits with shoulder holsters were standing in the doorway. The bullpen behind them had fallen silent, everyone watching and frozen in place. Like birds all fall silent together when something goes past them hunting.

One of the men was fishing around in his jacket pocket; his hand came back out with his badge and he flipped it open.

_But why now? _

_I haven't done anything for a year. _

I could hear Henderson's voice as if he were standing there_. That's when the targets get careless, Lois._

"I'm Special Agent Mark Santos."

I was dimly aware of Perry moving up beside me, to do God knows what. I remember the cheery oblivious fluorescence of the overheads, and someone's cubicle radio still playing out in the bullpen. All these people around me, I thought, all of them safe in their lives, and only mine was coming down around me.

"Perry White, under Article Six of the Good Citizen Act, you are hereby under arrest."

I nearly choked on my tongue. I stared at Perry.

And he looked back at me, grave, stern, and utterly unsurprised, silently forbidding me to open my mouth.

And then I felt like an idiot. _What, only _you_ can keep illegal sources, Lane? What part of this, exactly, is surprising?_

_Only the part where they bother to come for him._ The Good Citizen Act, written to widen the net to more true fallbait conspirators, hadn't been enforced against a reporter for a decade.

And if I wasn't under arrest as well, then Perry was being singled out for charges over something unrelated to J.J.

"Under which section exactly," Perry was saying beside me, his voice a miracle of steadiness, "am I formally accused?"

That was smart, and irritating, and from the look that flashed across his face, Santos knew it. The language of the Act would take him a good sixty seconds to plow through before he could even start reading Perry his rights.

During which - what? I remember looking around the room, surreptitiously, as if there had to be something there that could make three federal agents back down and go away. If we were clever enough, if we used it right. Somewhere in the infinite waveform of all possibilities – _stop it, Lane, pull it together._

Call for Superman? To do what? To draw the line that joined himself and me and the _Planet_ in indelible ink for all the world? To reject the authority of the U.S. government, and whisk Perry away to the frozen North?

"…including, but not limited to, illicit and undeclared possession of classified or sensitive information belonging to the United States Government, and information of types further defined in Articles Four and Five."

And if he didn't…a perfectly legal indefinite interrogation at an undisclosed location, subject to no mandatory trial deadline.

No doubt a location already lined in lead, against the day when the Man of Steel stopped tolerating the subversion of human rights.

"From what source or sources," Perry was asking, with an edge in his voice I hadn't heard before, "am I supposed to have gotten this illegal information? Human? Text?"

"Under Article Eight," Santos replied wearily, "no definitive source ID is required in the setting of reasonable evidence of possession. Did you want to hear the whole article?" There was an odd note in his voice, almost more of rueful understanding than annoyance.

Perry's shoulders relaxed fractionally. Apparently his source was safe.

Until they decided it was time to make him tell them.

_What the hell kind of lunch dates have you been keeping, Perry?_

But if Kal came, he could follow them, at the least. He could know where they took him. And then – what? But at least there would be options.

Almost, I shouted for him, and to hell with the world connecting the dots.

Then it occurred to me, belatedly, that shouting, speaking normally, and talking aloud at all were artificial distinctions to that inhuman hearing.

_Kal_, I subvocalized, _please. Perry's under Good Citizen arrest. We're in his office. He'll _disappear_. Can you watch them? Can you follow?_

"Under the circumstances," Perry was saying levelly, "can I have a few minutes to delegate to my people? I can do everything from in here."

Santos looked a him for a long moment. "Literally, a few minutes, Mr. White," he said finally.

Perry nodded. He turned to me.

None of us had moved since the conversation began; God only knows what I looked like as I looked back at him. My mind was running in circles; he had been just Perry a few moments ago, and now he looked so fragile, so brave and filled with finality, looking at him hit me like a blow.

Whatever he saw in my eyes, he gave me an encouraging little smile. "This is all it takes to shut you up, Lane?"

_Come down, or just watch from the sky_, I subvocalized. _Don't let him disappear._

Aloud, I said, "I won't let you disappear."

His face changed a little; I wondered if he'd seen the working of my jaw. "Feed J.J. for me, will you?"

Perry didn't have a pet. He was asking me to watch over his source.

"Of course I will." _Or would, if you'd ever, ever given me any idea who he was._

"And get that story down to a quarter page. Your stuff on the new fallbait devices should go in Arts and Sciences; it ruins the courage-and-sacrifice theme here."

"All right. All right. You want me to call Alice?"

He hesitated. "Not yet. In a few days, if…well, in a few days."

"Mr. White," Santos said softly, from the doorway.

Perry looked over at him. "Too long, already?"

"Unfortunately," Kal said from behind Santos, "Not quite long enough."

The two silent suit men whipped around and parted like waters. Standing there in the doorway, arms folded, implacable like the end of days on that Wednesday morning, Kal was the sweetest sight I'd ever seen. Even if the cold of his anger chilled me from across the room.

With the precision of a panther, he stepped between the agents and stood towering over Perry, who looked up at him, bemused.

"The statute of limitations, Mr. White," Kal said softly, "is five years on breaking and entering, and two on trespassing."

I looked up at him, open-mouthed, wondering which of the two men I trusted most was mad.

"Your most recent counts," he continued, "are one year and forty minutes ago, respectively."

He was fixed on Perry, but his eyes darted over to me for just a moment, and there I saw a bone- dry twinkle. The next moment I almost laughed aloud.

Kal was fixing him with local crimes. Which would send him to the local jail.

To sit in his cell in a _fully_ disclosed location, under the full Constitutional protection for a man not yet proven guilty, for an average of six months before trial. Minus imminent threat, the state's claim came first.

It was bad, but in comparison, it felt like freedom.

Perry opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

Kal turned to the men behind him. "I'm sorry, gentlemen," he said gravely. "I'll be giving Mr. White into the custody of the G.M.P.D. If you care to question him at the station, his attorney may be able to accommodate today to avoid wasting your trip."

The agents looked at each other. "Unbelievable," said Santos, who was nobody's fool.

It occurred to me the next moment that Kal could fix me with a count of trespassing after every shatterfall in Metropolis for the last two years. No doubt his charges against Perry were entirely true.

And Chief Henderson was going to kill us.

"Superman," said Perry, utterly bemused, "Can I bring my laptop?"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once they were gone, I told the crowd in the waiting bullpen as much as I could. That the agents were federal but the primary charges were state; that Perry was just going downtown for now; and that I had no idea what the circumstances of the crimes were.

What no one mentioned, and no one had to, was that a Good Citizen arrest of the _Planet's_ editor, one year to the day after the cult story broke, was a fine coincidence.

Or a wildly foolish, counterproductive display of muscle. What was possibly gained by unmasking a frightening degree of federal influence to punish the _Planet_ for taking on the cults? _Anyone_ could speculate, and everyone did; _we_ were dangerous as a source of facts. And they had just given the public a fact more devastating than anything we'd ever published. If the _Planet _folded today, people would still be talking about cult power in the government forever.

It was that same strange feeling all over again - stupidity and randomness on the surface, with something completely, sinisterly different, real or imagined, underneath.

I wound up on the roof again, pacing around trying to get my mind around it, till I thought there was a chance they might have finished processing Perry. Kal arrived as I was getting ready to head down to the station; we embraced, me nearly shaking with fury, him rigid with it.

Perry had told him more for me on the way. He had picked up his source about a month ago, the same way I had; a disillusioned true believer who needed a way to talk to the world. Only his was federal, not cult, and was different from J.J. in two critical, infuriating ways.

He was still loyal; he had specific names to investigate but wasn't about to spill his mission, his division or the rest of what he knew.

And he was so careful, so shy of giving out what he couldn't take back, that Perry had never seen him. Or spoken to him. Or gotten so much as a cover name. All their communication had been through drops and voice distorters and God knew what else. No wonder my poor Chief had been run all over the city and busted for trespassing.

And who could say _now_ that his skittish little source was wrong? As far as Perry could tell from his federal questioning, he'd been found through his own actions, his follow-up investigations on the names he was given. As far as he knew, his source was still at large.

Henderson stood by us with a grace that did him proud. Kal pulled his own strings behind the scene, with the tact never to mention my newfound hypocrisy about his manipulating the system. Perry stayed in the Metropolis jail awaiting an indefinitely postponed trial, and lost ten pounds in a month. He said he wasn't leaving regardless till he lost thirty, and I laughed more than it deserved every time he said it.

He subvocalized his contact protocols for his source to Kal for me. And our cloak-and-dagger friend responded to them once, enough to pass on his regret and confirm he was all right. Not to give me anything more to work on, whether because he had nothing more or because he didn't trust me.

In other respects Perry cooperated with federal questioning, because he knew almost nothing worth hiding. We started to wonder if the shadowy powers behind it all might even be satisfied with this, if the White case might be closed while he was still in Metropolis.

And meanwhile, I poked as quietly as I could at the names we had already. And they started replacing the "Assistant" in my job title with "Acting" – the most nominal title change I'd ever had, since Perry's iron grip on the paper barely loosened in his cell.

And I found a few of J.J.'s old college programming friends and hired them to expand and decentralize the _Planet's_ online functions, and move our archives to offshore servers.

They didn't ask why. They didn't have to.

About the same time, the tapes of the shatterfall chant recorded at J.J.'s retreat were released. One of the studios sold the recording, as a novelty. It was a big hit.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The other possibility," Kal said one night on the balcony, three months after Perry's arrest, "is that there are far _fewer_ people at the top than we think. Few enough that on the federal side, you're finding nothing on most because there's nothing to find."

As much as the topic unsettled me, that night I almost laughed as I watched him say it. Not because it was funny, but because he was struggling so visibly not to change the subject. From the moment he settled on the balcony, he'd had that grave look in his eyes, that carefulness of all his gestures, that meant he had something to bring up and was planning how to do it.

And because Perry, thin but cheerful, had said much the same thing that afternoon.

"But enough to wield the technical abilities," I countered, sighing. "Or to keep a grip on the ones who do. The untraceable communications networks, making people vanish, building a cult…three people at minimum. The alternative always being," I added, "a single evil supergenius."

He looked down over his massive shoulder at me; a warm gust blew over us, with the smell of grass and a few clippings, and his heavy cape lifted just slightly with it. It took me a moment to recognize the gallows amusement twinkling in his eyes.

I remember now, too, that his arms were folded, and his near hand was curled closed. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

"Since you had finished this conversation before it started," he said mildly, "I assume you had another purpose in letting me continue it."

Damn. I wasn't, apparently, as subtle as I thought. Nothing for it but the truth. I laughed ruefully and turned to face him. "I thought you'd need another few minutes," I admitted to those too-sharp eyes, "to bring up what you came for."

He looked startled, in his way, for a moment.

Then he smiled for just a second, his own surprisingly sweet, too-rare smile. He gave me a rueful chuckle. "I'm not certain, Lois Lane," he answered finally, "that you need me to speak aloud at all any more."

I looked up at him and smiled back.

But he wouldn't have long; he never did. I turned, and lifted myself with my arms to sit on the railing, facing the apartment, dangling my bare feet. The temperature had dropped a bit since I'd stepped out. "What is it?"

The laughter on his face faded. He looked at me gravely at me for a moment, and then out again at the wood. He took a breath, and then let it out.

"Did you know, Lois," he said softly, "It looks as if the increase in the shatterfall rate is nonlinear."

I blinked, and then thought about it.

"Exponential, you mean?" I asked softly, finally.

He shook his head. "It's not clear yet. We'll need another few months of data. But it might become…meaningful, in our lifetimes."

I closed my eyes and bent my head, thinking. Imagining the shatterfalls flaring around the world in quick succession, one on the heels of another, Kal drawn straight from each to the next.

How little sleep could he sustain? How many more would slip past him?

I looked up at him, with absolutely no idea what to say. Then, watching his face, I realized he wasn't done.

"My God," I said, almost involuntarily. "What is it you have to say, that _that_ was leading up to it gently?"

Kal ran his hand through his hair, the first nervous gesture I'd seen from him. He closed his eyes for just a moment. "That's part of it. And that needs to be public, regardless. But there _is_ more. I'm sorry."

I shook my head. "No, _I'm_ sorry. Just startled me. The last thing I want is for you to be even more careful." I paused a minute, watching him. "Old friend," I said finally, slowly, "what _did_ you come to tell me?"

He looked at me for another moment. Then he said levelly, "Under the circumstances, then…that other way…do you remember?"

_Don't worry, Lois. There may be another way._

My heart sank. "What do they want from you now?"

He gave me a brief, forced smile. "Nothing terrible."

Meaning nothing permanent? Nothing painful? "What, then?"

Watching him backlit there by the sunset, I realized that every tense line of him belied his words. He lifted his hands, helplessly, palms up, and the orange sunlight filtered down through his fingers.

"Offspring."

I blinked.

There in that warm May evening, as he looked back at me in that moment of lostness, I thought, _so it's today. _

I had thought about the question of cross-fertility a thousand times. About whether it was as ludicrous as it sounded. Or whether his human appearance could be, just possibly, a hint, at a deeper and more intimate kinship.

About whether he ever thought of having children of his own. About whether all the odds against my race might turn if we had more men of steel.

If anything, it surprised me that a scientific body with the current incentives had waited this long.

'_They'd need about five more just like you.'_

'_I've been trying to discourage that line of thought_.'

_You saw this coming too, old friend. And apparently, it unnerves you even more deeply now than it did then. _

_But why, exactly? The idea of it? The process? The responsibility?_

And then, as I had a hundred hundred times, I thought about the other implications of it. I had no idea if he ever felt desire. For any human, or for a woman of his own species; or if his people worked in some different way that made the question nonsensical.

Much less, what about a steady longing, a solid love? Had he ever had a _crush,_ as a boy, among the children of a species that looked so much like his own? The idea of the intimacies, the indignities, the sweet or dangerous mysteries of sex – how would they look from the outside, to a being like him?

But surely that was all irrelevant here, and surely he would know that. If it came through his shadow scientific team, if it was about our need, surely it would be an affair of test tubes and quality inspection and selected optimal hosts.

"Artificially, that is," he was saying in a rush, oblivious to my bemusement but eerily on topic. "There are volunteers, apparently – think of that, Lois – and imagine, that it should be possible…I didn't believe it, more of their wishful thinking, I thought. Faustian thinking, actually. But there _are_ forty-six chromosomes, by what strange miracle, or joke…of all the decisions I've made, I never thought…"

And then, as abruptly as it had started, his rush cut off, and he stood looking at me, utterly lost.

Without thinking, I slid down off the railing and stepped closer. "Hey." I reached up to put my hand on his massive shoulder, and felt his trembling, furnace-hot, like a startled animal. He stilled himself when he felt my fingers, as if he thought his shuddering was somehow dangerous.

I looked up and his eyes were closed. I was struck myself, more than I'd expected, at the cold wisdom of the idea. But _he_ was acting like a man being asked to choose which of his parents to kill.

"Kal," I said finally, when I couldn't stand watching him any more, "what is it? I know you thought of this long ago. It's shocking, still, but...you don't have to do it, of course, but…I've never seen you this way. What is it? What are you afraid of?"

He opened his eyes; the last glimmer of the orange sunset lit up their dark depths for a moment, and then the sun winked out below the trees. He looked down at me, utterly still now. "I'm sorry," he said helplessly after a moment. "I told you, it's not so terrible." He shook his head. "Not so much to ask, even."

"It's plenty to ask," I retorted indignantly. "But, you…"

"No, you're right," he said quickly. "There's more to it." He sighed, looking up at the skies again, where Mars was just becoming visible. As he looked, his face changed a little; grief, or exasperation, or both. He gave me a grey little chuckle.

"It's just that I may never understand," he said finally, helplessly, "why everyone's so certain that more beings with my powers in the world would be a blessing."

He tilted his head, ever so slightly, and his tone had a deeper unease than I'd ever heard from him before. "It's as if," he went on, "my genes, alone in all the universe, could only work for good. Why is it, Lois, that no one can remember the _reason_ I'm the last of my kind?"

That old friend, then - those dark reflections on his race and their self-destruction. That wariness of even himself, and now of his unborn children. It seemed like yesterday that I had thought that way myself.

_But if I lost my fear by knowing you, and you still have it, where does that leave us?_

My mind filled with test tubes again, but in a different light. I imagined it as if the embryos, or the mothers who carried them, would shine with a half-human, half-kryptonian light, the glow of all our race's hopes.

Or, in his eyes, the heat and kindling of a new invasion, a people rising like a phoenix from the ashes of their world's destruction.

_Now you sound as bad as he does. Perry would demote you for that kind of yellow dog speculation._

Then I wondered again if touch worked entirely differently for him, and let him go, patting his shoulder awkwardly.I looked back up at him; I think he saw the dawning of my half-understanding in my eyes.

"Were you, then," I said finally, in a vain attempt to lighten the moment, "such a terror as a child?"

He looked at me sharply, and I had the strange feeling of having stumbled backwards again, over something I hadn't planned to waken. "I was an ordinary child," he said finally. "Including the tantrums. And," he added almost unwillingly, "a clumsy adolescent."

"Kal," I said, "_did_ something happen? Is there something that haunts you?"

"No," he said softly. "Nothing happened. No day went by that it couldn't have. But that's not my point."

"Is it something you know about Krypton, then, that we don't?"

Kal shook his head. "They know - _you_ know - nearly as much in hard facts about my race as I do. I don't even speak the language well." He sighed. "Does it all sound absurd to you, then? But I can't feel differently, Lois. And they…they have a childlike disinterest in the potential of the power they're invoking."

He closed his eyes again.

Imagining, maybe, a dying Earth in its last centuries, ruled by a dynasty he had founded to save it. Maybe, swept and burned over by the family wars of half-immortals, while the shatterfalls made their grim harvests ever more often.

_Is it possible that you really hear such alien, warlike cries in your own heart, and barely silence them every night in your frozen Fortress?_ _Will it explode one day and boil over with your race's fury?_ _I might have believed that once. But I know you better than that now, don't I? _

_I think your judgment on this issue is suspect. And I'd like to know, someday, who taught you to think that way._

But his vision was also the most common story of human royalty in history. And he was right in at least this much: anyone who thought it _couldn't_ happen was a fool.

"All right," I said, more gently. "All right, then." I sighed, and turned to look out at the woods with him, watching my old friend's face in profile, his weary decency and his fear for all my world. "I'm not as worried as you are. But I understand." Then I sighed. "Would you hold out for sole custody?"

He shook his head immediately. "Sole _authority_. And sole custody on demand. Myself to supervise the process, to know exactly how many implantations are done. And nothing to be stored, no potential for churning out an army of half-kryptonians in a warehouse."

A moment later, we looked at each other and laughed grimly. Because clearly, while he'd been formulating reasons against it, he'd also been planning how to do it.

And then it made me smile sadly, to think of what wasn't part of this conversation yet. "It's _plenty_ to ask of a man, you know. It may be right. But it's also a violation. You're not even _complaining_ about that part."

He looked startled for a moment. Then he gave me a dry chuckle and a sidelong glance. "It's possible my sense of personal dignity isn't what it used to be," he admitted.

Laughing weirdly there with him, it almost broke my heart. Because I could see the future as if the sky had cracked open above me.

There were many ways, but they all led to the same place. His fears were of things half-possible, but the lives all scattered out beneath him, like the lights of our shrinking cities, were real. He knew it already; he trembled with the knowledge of it. Tomorrow, or the next day, he would do as they asked.

As if he read my mind, he said softly beside me, "I'm going to do this, aren't I, Lois?"

He sounded so much like J.J. in that moment, my eyes filled up with tears for both of them, as if it had been yesterday.

Because I had no other answer, I turned and slipped my arms around him, under his. Circling his warm back under his cape, the living knots of his muscles, my fingers didn't touch. He was shaking, but he didn't move away; his arms came back around me and we stood there, eyes closed, watching the future change.

That hand he had held closed all night was still fisted; I felt his knuckles, lightly, on my back.

"It's going to be all right," I whispered. "Do you want me to come with you?"

I felt the slight movement transmitted through his body, as he shook his head above me. "If I brought you," he whispered back, in the worst attempt yet to lighten the mood, "they'd have to kill you."

"Is it going to involve kryptonite?"

I felt him tense a little; he knew how much that had come to bother me. "I think so," he said finally, simply.

We stood that way for another moment. Then he gently disengaged "Lois," he said very softly. He stepped back and bent down to bring his eyes level with mine, unreadable.

"There's something else I need to tell you."

My heart pounded, without knowing why.

I remember the wind lifting the shock of his hair, more unruly than I'd ever seen it. "My… influence on the federal level isn't what it used to be." He smiled wryly. "For some reason, they don't seem to trust me quite as much as before."

I thought of Perry, safe in relative terms, downtown with his laptop in his cell when he could be _nowhere_. I wanted to say I was sorry - that I wasn't, but was.

"Kal," I started.

He shook his head again, and held my eyes. "You're the best target left standing, Lois Lane. And I'm not sure, anymore, that a few words from me will stop it."

A few months ago, I would have rolled my eyes. Now I looked back at him and said nothing; there was nothing to say.

He sighed. "I've been telling myself, if I kept a close enough watch, it wouldn't matter. But now, if I start going under kryptonite again…if things start to look wrong one day, and if I…don't hear you…" He hesitated. "Some day, you may want a place to hide."

I was absolutely still, as it started to half-dawn on me.

I remember the sudden near-stammer in his voice as he said it, the sudden nakedness in his eyes afterwards. "If that happens…" He opened his palm and held out a little scrap of paper.

Two lines. An address in a town named Smallville, in Kansas.

My blood pounding in my ears, I read it over. Once, then twice, then again.

I closed my eyes and repeated it twice in memory. When I opened them, he was watching me. I nodded.

He closed his palm again. I wasn't sure he was squeezing – his knuckles never whitened – but when he opened it, ashes drifted out.

"Ask for Martha Kent," he said, so softly I had to strain to hear. He closed his eyes for just an instant, and took a little breath. Then he opened them again on me, dark, wide, half-afraid.

"Tell her Clark sent you."

I stared at him.

_Pleased to meet you, Clark_, I meant to say. _I won't betray you, Clark_.

_You look like a Clark, Clark. _

But the thing I couldn't shake, looking at him, was that he looked like a man finished making his peace, giving out his possessions on his way to the gallows.

"Clark Kent," I said softly, helplessly, "My god. You…I…are you sure you don't want me to come?"

"Of course I do," he whispered back, looking for all the world more seventeen than thirty-four. "But I don't want you in a secure federal facility, unknown to anyone outside, while I'm under kryptonite. It's like dangling bait. It almost doesn't matter if the tiger's hungry."

We looked at each other for a long moment.

And then my eyes drifted over him more slowly, in uneasy, belated wonder. I had the fleeting image of a gawky boy working a Kansas cornfield under the sunset, always careful to hold himself back, not to finish too impossibly quickly.

"Okay. Okay." I held out my hand, like the night we'd met, so long ago. "Pleased to meet you, Clark Kent," I said belatedly.

He took it, and smiled back, and then let me go. "You'll remember the address?"

I looked back out over the city. I was touched to the core. Awestruck, at how the world held wonderful secrets and not just dark ones. And afraid for him. Less for his body than for his haunted, alien, innocent heart.

I took a breath. Enough mystery and heaviness. He'd just given me something precious. He was going to give our race something more precious by far – at what unguessable cost? I could feel the infinite waveform around us, the infinity of the futures it could collapse to.

_Don't carry all of them at once, then_, Perry would say. Or Dad.

"I'll remember the address," I said blandly, "but what was your name again?"

He laughed out loud.

"I won't betray you, Clark Kent."

"I know," he said softly.

"And you – you'll do what you have to do. And it _will_ be all right."

He was silent for a moment. "And that day when I stand before God, stripped of my powers," he whispered again, "we'll know then if it was the right decision."

That one, my father reached out from the grave to answer for me, as I laid my hands on his shoulders. "No, Kal, Clark," I answered him. "If you meant it for good, he won't condemn it. The one who pays only for performance is Satan."

I was dimly surprised, as I said it, to realize I believed it. _Point to you, Dad,_ I thought, as he let out a breath twice as long as a man's, as he relaxed just a bit under my hands, as he drew me close again.

"Even Calvin," I muttered against him, as an afterthought, "knew _that_ much."

"Perhaps," he allowed softly, his chest rumbling against me, "I just haven't made it to that chapter yet."

Then he disengaged, and stood again, and was gone.


	6. Chapter 6

_A/N: All right, folks. I think the story stands or falls on whether this chapter works. Help me, if you will, with the believability of the interactions, motivations and decisions here. Let me know where I pulled it off, and where I didn't. This should be my most educational experience here yet._

"This isn't really," Jimmy told me, the morning Kal had set to propagate his species, "the job I first signed up for."

He'd been saying the same thing since his first week at the _Planet_. But the meaning had changed over the years.

The first time, he'd meant exactly what he said. Perry had just sentenced him to three days of background reading, before he could come with me to the ribbon cutting for Metropolis Children's Hospital. That time, when Jimmy complained about it, Perry took him into his office for an hour, to explain the difference between photography and photo_journalism _in unforgettable detail.

For the next couple of years, "not the job I first signed up for" was an inside joke Jimmy and I told each other, while picking locks or crawling belly-down through sewage.

And then more recently, it had become his wistful, not-quite-bitter commentary, on the strangeness of trying to make the latest shatterfall site look any different from the last one.

That morning, when he leaned against my doorway –_he's gotten so tall_, I thought - and said those words in a low, measured tone that hadn't cracked for years, it meant federal agents were back in his darkroom again.

No doubt under our old friend Santos.

I'd been useless and half-present all that morning, till that moment. I kept seeing the silent weight on Kal's shoulders, the half-plumbed depths of grief and worry still in his eyes when he'd last left. So when my eyes met Jimmy's, as the spark of our mutual anger lit up, I was almost glad for the distraction.

This was the fourth time agents had come through the _Planet_, searching and questioning, in the three months since Perry's arrest. One of those had cost Jimmy the accidental exposure of a week's worth of negatives. The others were just time-consuming, nerve-racking and galling.

And I had never really managed to alter them at all. I had watched the first time, shouted and waved my arms around the second, and heckled the third. The men had finished their questions and searched their targets one way or another, regardless.

But affecting _them_ wasn't really the point.

Because since the day Kal came for Perry, things had never been the same. The Lord of the Skies had fought for us. He had taken our side against our own government. We had taken damage, but under his protection, we were still standing. I'd never seen the investigative staff as darkly cheerful, as intense, as purposeful as they'd become in the months that followed. We had published three exposes of federal-cult connections in the last three months. My people saw battle lines coalescing. They saw themselves as the standard-bearers.

A grandiose delusion, all of it. But the same time-honored delusion that's entranced us investigative reporters since the birth of the profession.

And it meant my staff couldn't stand to take unconstitutional searches from an unconstitutional law quietly any more. I couldn't stay completely silent. My people would be heartbroken.

And so of course this had happened today, when Kal was under kryptonite.

"You want me to just keep quiet, this time?" Jimmy was saying.

I shook my head. "Let's go." I wouldn't let my mouth run away with me. I'd step carefully. I'd stand between them and the staff, but not escalate the situation.

I followed him to the darkroom, past the several agents stationed around the bullpen, while the staff all watched silently from their cubicles. I found Santos and his men rooting around in the darkroom with the negatives, with the lights off, wearing night vision goggles.

I stood in the doorway and flipped on the light. Santos and his goons stood there blinking dazedly in the fluorescents.

"You gentlemen find Deep Throat in the cuttings bin, yet?" I demanded.

Then it occurred to me that flipping on the light was petty, and everything I'd done so far counted as escalating – they had been making some effort at causing minimal damage. They couldn't have known Jimmy had finished processing his batch last night.

_Funny - nothing I just did was remotely illegal, but I'm already afraid. Not so brave, without Kal in the skies, are you, Lane? _

"Always hopeful, Miss Lane," Santos said blandly. "We don't come for the coffee."

That was so irritating I forgot to be nervous again. Apparently Santos wanted to frame us as having some kind of playful banter. Some token friction, where the government bickers with the Fourth Estate but everyone's really on the same side. _Not going to happen, with Perry sitting in a city jail to stay out of a federal ghoulag. _

But I also wasn't going to overreact and let him paint us as hysterical and uncooperative. I kept my voice level.

"My staff doesn't work well when you're here. You can't help that, and neither can I. What has to happen before you can leave?"

"You could give us your Chief's source," he said seriously. "Stop pretending there's something here to make a stand over."

That was funny, because it confirmed what I'd suspected the first three times, about why they were really here. And because Santos didn't seem to care whether I knew it.

Well, _I_ cared. That might be a real way to end these surprise visits. If I played it right. Because it had to be guesswork on his part that I knew anything about the source at all – all my conversations with Perry were monitored, and there was no conceivable proof that I had the contact protocols or could ever have gotten them after the arrest.

"Santos," I told him, "I'd hand him over baked in gravy to get my newsroom back. If you're so sure he's federal, that means _you_ people trained him to be sneaky. _I can't help you._" The words were false, but the bitterness was real.

I came up to him, there in Jimmy's little fortress hung with prints, stepping over basins of sloshing chemicals to get there. "We both know this is about pressure, not evidence. But what you don't get is that the only person in the room who was surprised, the day you came for Perry, was me. Don't think that isn't eating me alive, but it's true."

He stood there looking down at me for a moment. Then he glanced past me, at the doorway. I looked back. One of his men from the bullpen was there. Whatever the man been mouthing, he clamped his lips shut the minute he saw me turn.

I glanced back at Santos. He met my eyes again and sighed. And then, unbelievably, he gestured to his men and they followed him out past us.

They had to pass through the whole bullpen to the exit, through the long morning light coming down through the high wall windows. Staff watched from the cubicles, and from the railings of two floors of balconies above. No one was gauche or foolish enough to actually hoot as I marched them out.

I followed them outside, wondering what _other_ crisis of national security needed the Metropolis team even more urgently.

Santos did turn after the doors closed behind us. "Don't put on that little performance, Miss Lane," he had the audacity to say softly, "with anyone else but me."

For a moment I thought he meant the part about not knowing the source, and my heart skipped a beat. Then I realized he meant my reckless posturing before. But this bid for the role of the fair-minded lawman, after he'd tried to deliver my Chief into a living hell, made me angrier than anything he'd done yet. I laughed incredulously.

"Does someone else do the bad cop," I answered, "or do you play both sides?"

It wasn't especially clever, but he blinked. Then he turned to go. It was so satisfying, for one moment, that it made me realize how eager I was to be angry.

And then I remembered again that we were alone today.

And Kal was alone too, and in pain, giving something incandescent and earthshaking to the same many-handed creature that had just probed a few fingers into the Planet.

Suddenly, watching them go, I just felt tired.

When I got back inside, someone whooped and the clapping started. I rolled my eyes and waved people back to work, but the taste of it was spoiled in my mouth.

Back in my office, I dropped back down in my chair and rubbed my eyes. _Well done, Lois. Needlessly provocative. Maybe Santos really does want to be a decent guy. _

But I could still hear laughing outside from the staff. They had needed that. No one but Jimmy had even heard any of the words between us. But seeing someone go to face the hounds – that, they needed.

_The way Metropolis needs Superman? Is _that_ what you think you are for the _Planet?

I thought, irrelevantly, of the way people gathered at his rescue sites lately, to touch his cape or his body as he passed. The way they handed him their babies to hold for a moment. He always looked uneasy, in his own way, but he took them. He didn't understand it, but he knew it was what they needed.

_The difference is, he _can_ protect them. Not perfectly. But enough to justify their hope._

_Where are you leading the staff of the _Planet_, Lois Lane? How well will _you_ protect them, when Kal's under kryptonite and the next Santos comes for the next Perry? _They_ think they're outlaws already. They think, God bless them, that they're already _fighting_ the battle._

I knew better. I knew from fifteen years of military childhood in failed nations, from a life of Dad and Perry's dinnertable talk, that we'd seen nothing yet.

I got out of my chair and went back to the doorway. I watched the staff getting back to work, drinking coffee, taking calls and putting calls on hold.

_I can't protect any of you. Maybe I should stop putting you in danger. Maybe we should go back to the days before Kal ever met my eyes at a shatterfall site and made me ashamed of what we'd become._

_God of my father, keep them safe. Don't let them pay for my grandiosity and my short temper. Give us a little time, a little peace, to figure all this out._

_Of course, even if I muzzled us today, one of you could go home and start dinner and a fall could come and take you._

And that was what was most damning. None of this was even the real war.

Our little exposes and scuffles with our government were, so far, like trapping the rats on a sinking ship. Kal might shelter us when he could, and dignify us with his silent approval. And we had struck one good blow, bringing down the east coast cults. But the true war was being fought today in a classified lab full of kryptonite. And as usual, he _was_ fighting it alone.

Suddenly I was irritated with myself, for playing into our show. Grandiose, indeed.

_Even if it _was_ fun. A good way to start the morning. And easier than I expected – excellent timing._

Much, it finally occurred to me, too easy and too excellent.

A few agents in the back. More agents in the bullpen. I had walked past them to the darkroom. They had stayed behind, near the hall to the private offices.

_Ridiculous, Lois. _

_If you wanted to plant fallbait in someone's office, how would you do it?_

_Don't start down that path. No one's found corruption at the level of the field agents._

_Wouldn't have to be corruption there. Just obedience to corruption higher up._

_And what then? The new generation of fallbaits could always be anywhere. Will you tear your house apart every night? You wouldn't be the first to go mad that way._

_But how stupid will you feel if a fall does come, and you thought this far and talked yourself out of looking?_

_Not very. I'll be dead._

I always lost these arguments. Feeling half-idiotic, but with my heart pounding, knowing I wouldn't get anything done until I looked, I went back to my office. I started with my desk drawers, rifling through them, trying to remember if anything looked out of place.

Of course, I was wrong. There wasn't any fallbait in my desk.

It was in my bookshelf.

Palm-sized, disk-shaped, all smooth plastic, the damned little thing was both easy to miss and brazen.

And there were so many better places in my office to hide it that I wondered, rolling it over in my palm, whether it was meant as a threat and not a serious attempt at all.

I took it to the roof and put it through our contained electromagnetic pulse chamber. We were one of three civilian institutions in Metropolis that had our own EMP – Perry's purchase, after my fallbait cult series, when the death threats were peaking. And as the confirmation testing for deactivation whirred along, I leaned back against the wall and collected my thoughts.

It was outrageous, inconceivable. _If_ Santos' men, or just one of his men, had even been the ones to plant it. It could be a hideous coincidence. It could even be someone above them trying to frame _them._

And the irony was, it didn't even matter. Because, regardless, now we had to evacuate and declare ourselves the first American target of the new breed of fallbait.

Never mind that less than one in a hundred fallbaits used a second bait for backup, and evacuating now was an utter waste of time. Or that tomorrow there would be another next-gen strike somewhere else, no matter what anyone did today.

We'd be cordoned off and subpoenaed and investigated. The _Planet_ would become the showground for the American response. Today's edition could be the last for weeks. It was almost as good as just closing us down.

There in the shadow of the old Planet globe, that wood and steel monstrosity that had shaded my smoke breaks and my meets with Kal and now my fallbait deactivating, I sighed. _Perry, this isn't exactly the job I first signed up for. _

_Help, Superman_, I added, to my own bitter unamusement.

The EMP finished. I glanced at the readout.

The fallbait wasn't just dead. It had never been active. It must have been on a timer that hadn't activated yet.

So we'd never been in imminent danger of a fall. Not that it made a difference.

I shook my head, went back to my office and hit the shatterfall drill button.

Nothing happened. I jiggled it. Nothing.

_Oh, shit._

My heart kicked up in my chest. _Guess the chance of there being a backup fallbait just increased, folks. _

I closed my eyes for a second. My skin was crawling. _Okay, that's okay. We'll do it one floor at a time. _

I headed for the phone. The dial tone made me giddy with relief; I realized I'd half-expected the line to be dead.

I started with the guard in the first floor lobby.

"Vince, it's Lois. Is your floor's overhead paging working?"

Silence for a moment. "I think so. Why? Yours out?"

"Go on and flip it on for me."

"Are you expecting someone? The lobby's empty."

"I need you to relay a page."

"Everything okay up there?"

"You got the overhead on yet, Vince?" I felt like an ass, stringing it out like that. But I was afraid half the receptionists would bolt and run without announcing, if I told them the news up front.

A moment's pause. "It's on."

"Thanks. Repeat this. Ladies and gentlemen…"

"Ladies and gentlemen."

"This is a fallbait alarm. This is not a drill."

"This is a fallbait alarm. This is…oh, shit. Uh, this is not a drill. Repeating, a fallbait alarm is being activated. Christ, Lois, is the system down? Are we under -"

"You got it. It could still be nothing, but…you got it from here, down there?"

"You need me to call the other floors?"

I blinked. That stroke of genius hadn't occurred to me. "You want to take one through eight, while I take nine and up?"

"No," came Kal's voice from the doorway.

He looked brilliant, calm, and utterly well. My heart leapt. "Take the odds and give him the evens, and you both work up. So people from the higher floors don't trample the ones below."

I stared up at him as he came to my desk. For those few moments my heart unclenched with relief.

Then I caught a strange flash of naked, wordless fury in his eyes. Not so calm after all. Then he controlled it again.

And _then _I remembered that I hadn't called him.

Which meant that I knew what had.

"You catch that, Vince?" I said numbly, without moving my eyes.

"I got it. Thank God he's here."

"Yeah." I set the phone back down on the cradle. "How long do we have before it comes?"

"Maybe five minutes." There was a tight undercurrent in his voice I'd never heard before. Then he got that under control as well. "But I can't triangulate it vertically. It could be any few floors. Was there bait?"

I held up my thumb and forefinger, to show him the size. His eyes widened, and then narrowed, understanding. "In my desk drawer. But I EMP'd it. There must be others."

He turned his eyes to the floor. They glazed with that otherworldly shift of his deep vision, peeling down through the floors and walls. Then he swept that strange gaze up to the ceiling, and did the same for the floors above us. If I'd had any doubt about his not having gone under kryptonite that morning, it was gone. I wondered inanely if they'd found a way to work without it.

A moment later, he looked back at me and shook his head. "Nothing I can find."

I nodded. "Okay. Okay. I have to make the calls from inside. Or I'll spend the whole time fighting with the switchboard."

We looked at each other for an instant longer. That fury was still glittering in his eyes; his voice was calm. "Make your calls. I'll start on the top floors."

I nodded. My mouth was dry. _The gristle holds together, and the flesh drips out._

_Grow up, Lane._

"Lois. I _will_ be back for you, before it comes."

I nodded again.

"Guys?" came Jimmy's voice, sick and quiet, from the doorway. From the look in his eyes, he'd heard plenty.

"Jimmy," I said, "please get out. Go. I've got this."

He closed his eyes. "But the first three stories have wooden floor beams."

We both stared at him.

"They don't carry the building's weight. Just their floors. Lois, you know, right?"

Of course I did. He was right. They were the ribs of the original _Planet_. I looked back and forth between them. "Okay. But maybe it won't happen there."

Kal went perfectly still for a moment. Then he shifted his gaze back to me. "All right. Same plan, Miss Lane."

I went for the phone.

He turned to Jimmy. "Come with me, James Olson," he said gravely, and stretched out his hand.

I was on the phone with the third floor's receptionist when they went out the window.

I made it through the thirteenth's before he got back. All of them held steady long enough to make the overhead announcement four times. I'd never been so proud of our administrative staff in my life.

Kal waited as I finished the fifteenth, the last. He held out his arms as I hung up, and I stepped into them. They closed around me, one hand pressing my head tight against him to prevent whiplash. He was damp with the sweat of fifty terrified _Planet_ employees.

His acceleration was fierce and hard. The world dropped, my stomach tightened; my arms convulsed around him for a moment. When he set me down in the crowd a moment later, I staggered a step and he caught my elbow.

There we all were, huddled back at the feet of the glassy high-rises all round us, and he was off again.

A bit over three minutes had passed.

The next few minutes were full of glass shattering time and again, the blur of him shooting in and out of the windows, setting screaming people down and shooting off again. He was targeting the higher floors, while people poured out the front entrance. Everyone was shrieking, crying, inside the building and out on the street. Someone had called the police, and squad cars were wailing in from the cross streets.

And then the flow of people trailed off, and then it stopped. Not five minutes had passed.

I peered into the revolving doors; I couldn't see anything through the glare and distance. Had the fall come early? Another ten seconds passed, and the edges of the crowd started to drift forward. The police started shouting at people to stay back.

Something massive cracked inside, traveled like a shot, cracked again.

_Oh, Jimmy, you were right._

The screaming changed. People started pointing up at the roof.

Where the great globe of the Planet was folding and melting, the steel ribs sinking through wooden brackets and support beams gone soft like molasses. Obscenely, like bread falling, it sank in on itself without falling off center. The curved ribs thudded, one after another, on the concrete roof, and then toppled over and rang as they settled flat.

_My God. It took the bottom floors and the roof at once. _

_That has to be the biggest shatterfall in history._

Kal stepped from the wreckage a few moments later. He stood talking with the police for a moment, among the flashing lights of the squad cars and ambulances. They were telling him something; he became very still, and nodded, and shot off into the sky.

The count, all told, was no one dead from the shatterfall, but eleven injured from trampling.

Jimmy and I split up the calls to their families. My mind was churning as I made them, there on my cell in the middle of the milling crowd as the ambulances pulled away. Partly over how much worse it could have been, how many calls of a different sort I might be making now. Or how it might be Jimmy, calling Lucy and Mom.

Partly over how Perry's heart would break, how he should never see that crumpled globe.

But mostly, under it all, with a fierce, quiet, horrified awe.

Because in the planning this latest disaster, our faceless enemies had let something slip.

That fallbait was meant to be found. It was atrociously hidden. It was begging for it. But _after_ the shatterfall. During the standard cleanup search, it would have provided the usual explanation for why disaster had come.

Only I knew that it had never once been active.

Which meant the shatterfall itself had been intelligently targeted, and someone had known it. Maybe no shatterfall had ever been a natural phenomenon.

And what _that_ meant, God only knew.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I came back to the _Planet_ after dark. I threaded my way between the official vehicles, their silent flashers flicking on and off, making the long shadows leap from one angle to another. No one stopped me.

The damaged floors were locked off. I didn't want to see them anyway, the wooden desks and chairs melted into each other, the first three floors all jumbled up together at wrong angles on the ground.

But the stairwell was open. I took the sixteen flights up to the top, with a couple of stops to catch my breath. I came out onto the roof, where the carcass of the globe lay in the moonlight like a broken monster.

"It's after curfew," Kal said softly, behind me.

I turned and looked at him, without blinking, so as not to see the wreckage around us any more.

I saw the brief glimmer of his deep vision in the moonlight, as he swept me for injuries. He didn't look like he'd been to the Fortress that night.

He hardly could have. In the hours since the _Planet_ fell, eight new shatterfalls had struck governmental centers worldwide. Each one, with a next-generation fallbait at the scene. Twelve hundred potential casualties – but today, at least, all but six of them averted. At then, to top it, an arson back here in Metropolis, at a warehouse on Fifth and King – a sympathy crime, no doubt, from a lone cultist who hadn't had enough notice to get hold of proper bait.

We stood looking at each other in silence for a while. Then I looked back out over the city.

"My dad's funeral," I said finally, "was five weeks after the third round of chemo failed." Kal's eyes widened a bit, that slight gesture that used to look so spare to me. I buried my hands in my pockets.

"That was a few years into the shatterfalls, when it was just starting to look like we couldn't lick them. The minister had caught the self-pity bug that was going around among the living. He picked the verse that reads, '_The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart. Devout men are taken away_…"

"'_And no one understands_,'" Kal finished softly_, 'that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil._'"

That surprised me only slightly; I wondered distantly if there was anything in the history of man's religions that he hadn't read. And memorized instantly, flawless to the word. In rural Kansas, he'd most likely have been raised by Baptists. Or Presbyterians, given his penchant for Calvin.

"Utter wishful thinking," I answered, turning back to him. "But even so, I'm glad Perry can't see this yet."

"Lois," he said, with a strange note in his voice, "I'm so sorry."

Without quite knowing why, I thought of Jimmy in the doorway again. And Vince, at the lobby desk. I said, "I was sure it was me that they – whoever - were after. A threat. Pressure. Maybe a little one-room shatterfall."

He raised his eyebrows. "Which wasn't unlikely."

"No. Just wrong." I opened my mouth again, to say something about how I'd been sure I had taken care of it, how I'd been bitter about having to go through the motions. Then I decided that the details of my prickles of guilt over my private thoughts this morning were a bit self-indulgent.

So instead I said, "It was the _Planet_ they wanted. The whole _Planet_. God. Who ever heard of a twenty-story shatterfall?"

The anger flashed again in his eyes. "Brutal theatrics. The others today were the usual size. There must have been something different about your bait."

I smiled grimly. "Oh, there was." And then I told him what had happened that morning till he came.

He almost laughed once or twice, when I told him about my run-in with Santos. After I finished, about the fallbait being dead from the start, he was silent for a long moment. He looked out over the decaying skyline, into the night.

Finally he said, quietly, "That changes everything."

I looked up at him.

"For one thing, I suspect I know now why they can make these new ones so small." He said it pensively, as if his mind were halfway elsewhere.

"You think they don't work at all."

He glanced back down at me. "Not if they don't have to."

We looked at each other there in the warm and desolate night, with the siren lights flashing, and the shatterfall's handiwork sixteen stories down, right beneath us.

"I think," he said finally, "that the shatterfalls are really and truly drawn to power. And to true high-current fallbait. We have fifteen years of evidence for that. But if this is also true, if they can be _sent_…then even if your people close the power plants, let the factories rust, and go back to the soil, they won't be safe. And someone prefers they not know that."

There was a strange edge in his voice on the word 'someone'. I had thought about that question all that afternoon- a now-indisputable intelligence, with a power no scientific publication had ever explained and no leak had ever hinted at. What if it _was_ federal?

What if it wasn't?

Five years ago, I would have been burning like the wrath of God, full of schemes to track it all down and expose it. Half of me still was. The other half knew that that smooth lack of leads was as perfect as ever, and there was still no way inside it.

_My poor people_. _ You won a moral victory with the cults. But it turns out you have an enemy whose face we've never seen, and I don't know how to find it. A bigger, more chilling dead-end._

"But we _will_ find it. Maybe." Kal raised his eyebrows, and I realized I'd said that aloud. "Who's behind it, I mean. Even if it just means waiting for the next mistake. They might make another."

Kal hesitated. "Someone may find it," he agreed. "What you've learned should be public, certainly."

"We still have the online site. It will be."

There was a curious gentleness in his eyes, as he looked me over again. Not his deep vision this time; he was looking for something else. "Yes," he agreed again. "And then what?"

There was no point pretending not to follow.

We both knew the building was never going to be recertified for occupancy. Our funds would be frozen till the background investigation of my staff finished, and that would also be never, whether any were guilty or not. Whether the feds had anything to do with the fallbait, or the shatterfall, or not. "When the rabbit jumps into your stewpot," Perry would say, "you don't make it go back and come in through the snare."

None of which really even mattered. Because the question wasn't whether we could pick up the pieces. It was whether we should even try.

For what purpose - to resurrect the same maverick spirit that had nearly gotten my staff killed today? They were never prepared to be vigilantes. They weren't going to find the power behind fifteen years of shatterfalls by flipping through their tattered contact books and going to press conferences. They were white-collar office workers with families, who fell in love with a cause and nearly died because they thought they were still living in the old America. This wasn't their game any more.

"Got to find them jobs," I mumbled.

"And you," he said more gently, "then what?"

"Oh, _I'm_ unemployable," I said absently, reflexively. Which was true, of course, in the States. Probably not in the international market. Maybe in one of the European Union countries itching to flaunt its independence, where the press was no freer in general but might be freer to write dangerous things about America.

Oh, yes, where I'd be on the wrong side of the ocean from the only thing remotely resembling a lead.

Then I shook myself. What was I thinking? It was eight hours since the fall. I shouldn't be making any decision bigger than fish or chicken for dinner. I looked up at him. "I don't know, Kal. I don't know yet."

But he almost smiled. "I'm glad."

I blinked.

"Lois," he said softly, steadily, "_don't_ decide right away. You've been a soldier for your people. You won them their first battle, and now you can prove to them once and for all that they're at war. That may be all they needed from you." Carefully, he took my shoulders; paradoxically, the heat from his big hands made me shiver, realizing the rest of the night had turned cool. "Maybe the battle belongs to others now."

Weirdly, looking back into his dark eyes, the grace and freedom in those words was better than warmth. It flooded me for a moment, like a band across my chest had snapped. One more expose, the greatest yet - and then no more worrying about employees, no more haunting the shatterfall sites, no more checking the alarm four times at night and knowing it wouldn't stop the ones who meant it. And it would be all right, not a sin, wouldn't make him ashamed of us again, because the battle belonged to others now.

"_You'd_ never buy those words."

"For me, they'll never be true." Kal laid one hand on my head, like a blessing, like a sacrament. "But we're not all made the same." He hesitated just a moment. "You could choose now to disappear."

It took me a moment to realize what he meant. "_Smallville?"_ I almost laughed aloud; he dropped his hands, folded his arms across his chest, and looked back at me with a new twinkle in his eye.

"Kal. I don't know, about what comes next. But I don't think I'm an individual assassination target yet. We're already halfway to being martyrs today – I don't think they'd want to make a real one, unless we came back swinging." I laughed dryly. "I doubt even this fall was expected to _kill_ anyone. It's been over a year since a fall in Metropolis itself got past you."

In fact, the past few months, even as they multiplied, almost none had gotten past him anywhere. "And it's not like they would have known you'd be under today."

A sudden darkness flitted over his face. And then I remembered that he hadn't gone under kryptonite today at all.

"God, Kal, I'm sorry. With everything, I didn't…of _course_ I was going to ask you. This morning, you weren't…how did it…" I made myself stop, took a breath, and started over. "What happened?"

I saw that involuntary flicker of anger again, before he stilled it, looking at me. Then he sighed, and said, simply, "I changed my mind. I thought better of it."

Weird, how those words relieved me by surprise again, how they came like cool water, just one sip's worth.

"And so I told them not to bother with titrating out the kryptonite." He looked up at me, grim again. "And _that_ made him very nervous."

I blinked. "Him? Your lead investigator? Your Schrodinger's man?"

Kal nodded. His eyes were narrowed again; I was certain, for a moment, he was seeing it again in his mind's eye.

And then, more relevantly, it occurred to me what he meant.

"About what time," I said slowly, "were you refusing to go under?"

"About half an hour," he answered levelly, "before your fall began to sound."

We looked at each other in dark mutual understanding, him grim, me in fury dawning all over again, when a moment ago I'd thought I was too tired. Kal would have missed every fall this day, the worst in five years.

I had no idea what to say. Then I did.

"That son of a bitch."

"I've known him fifteen years," Kal said simply. "And I spent that half hour in the sky, wondering if I was irrational, or going mad. Reversing my decisions on a few moments' thought, seeing enemies in old friends. I wondered if kryptonite poisoning could do such a thing, and me never know it. And then I didn't have to wonder any more."

I looked him over, my mind racing. That lead investigator. That man who meant nothing to me, whom I'd barely heard of. How much had Kal trusted him? Enough to go under his power, God knew how many times, for how many years. Enough to talk physics and philosophy with him. How much was that?

"Do you think," I said slowly, "that he knew it was coming _without_ bait?"

Kal smiled darkly. "Was he, you mean, another rank-and-file fallbait cultist. Or something very different. My question exactly."

I let out a low whistle. "And what about the lab, and the others? What do you make of it?"

"Very little," he answered quietly. "After the fall, by the time I returned, there wasn't much left."

"The 5th and King warehouse." I felt sick.

"The lead from the walls was in puddles. Still liquid. I walked through the wreckage, and it sizzled under my feet." He paused for a moment. Without looking at me, he added softly, "I thanked God, when I found bullet holes in the skulls. That was a mercy."

I took hold of his arm. They were friends, or teammates, or uneasy allies, for him. For me, it was more grief for strangers. I felt sick. And then ashamed, at my sneaking gratitude that it wasn't him comforting me over the _Planet_ staff.

This was becoming a very bad night.

He was speaking again. "His secretary wasn't among them. Kitty something. A sweet, vapid little thing. She used to have whims sometimes, about trying to understand what we were doing, but they never lasted long. For her, I don't know even what to hope for."

I found my voice. "Who is he, Kal?"

He turned to me and raised his eyebrows.

"I'll investigate the hell out of him." It sounded so thin, so macho. As if I'd forgotten I didn't have an office anymore.

But he had the grace not to smile; he knew, for what it was worth, that I meant it. Instead he said, simply, "I'd be grateful. Last name, Luthor. First name, Lex. Of course, most of that you could do from anywhere…"

"Luthor with an E? Or an O?"

"An O."

"Anything I'm looking _for_?"

He sighed. "Old research. Data that was never published. Political leanings. Lukewarm letters of recommendation. I don't know. Of course you won't find anything criminal. Or civil."

"No. Not if he carried the clearance to work on you. But physicists don't coolly carry out their _first_ six murders and their first arson in the same half hour."

And then I felt sick again, as it occurred to me Kal could never have ignored today's pattern in retrospect. If Luthor had gotten what he wanted today, I doubted he would have wanted Kal alive to ask questions afterwards.

"Especially," he added into my reverie, "look for anything to do with his observer phenomenon. Cats, or no cats."

I nodded. "Kal," I said softly, "I'm so sorry."

He looked back at me. "I didn't know any of them well. Just long. God forgive me, when I left…it didn't occur to me that, whatever it was, not all of them were in on it."

"And that your principal investigator was a calculating sociopath? That he might kill them in the next half hour?"

It had sounded less flippant in my mind. But he gave me a ghost of a smile.

It never seems right to mention something new, right after speaking of strangers' sufferings. But there was one question we had been circling long enough.

"Why didn't you do it?"

He looked back over at me, unsurprised. "Lois," he said after a moment, "would you forgive me, for setting that aside for now?" He sighed. "I know that's a poor trade for the things I've learned from you tonight. But I need to think first. I need to see how the pieces settle out. I need to plan." Then his eyes softened again. "And you have enough to think of already."

_Don't we both._ "I'll forgive you," I allowed, "but I won't forget."

"Do you want," Kal said softly, for the first time in over a year, "to come back to the Fortress tonight?"

I thought about it for a moment. It might not be a bad idea.

And then I realized that it was, that I didn't want to lose what was left to me of the _Planet_ that way. Including the grief.

I smiled up at him dryly. "And not feel curious again, about why you changed your mind, till the middle of the week? You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

He smiled back at me, gravely, with that same dry twinkle I'd first seen on my balcony so long ago. We sat in silence for a while, till he heard another fall coming, somewhere. I stayed on for a few moments, looking down at the city.

_I asked You to protect my staff, and you gave them a shatterfall. I asked You for a little peace, and You gave me more work to do, another clue and no idea what to do with it. I asked you to protect a brave boy trying to do a man's job, and they never even found his body._

_I asked You to spare my dad, and we all know how that turned out._

_Maybe after these last pieces, I _will_ retire._

_Liar._

And then finally, my anger drained, I thought_, the life I had is over. And I don't know where to go._

I shook my head, stopped whining, and headed home.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The days that followed were mad, pivotal, and not as bad as I'd expected.

I made my first and hardest call to the Assistant Editor of the _Metropolis Sun_. We'd come up the ranks in parallel. She was wickedly cynical, controlled her mouth better than I did, and treated her people fairly.

"I know it's a hell of a time to call, Les," I led off. "Have you got a minute for me?"

She was silent for a second; thinking, I imagined, of what happens when a drowning man gets hold of another swimmer. I couldn't blame her. I didn't even disagree. Who was I to say when _they_ had to make a last stand?

_But I don't want you to follow us down, Les. Much as it pains me, I want your circulation to triple. _

_I want you to need a lot of new employees._

"Lois," she said simply, "starting yesterday, we're all _Planet_. Tell me what you need."

If I'd gotten less sleep, I might have lost it right then, with that small kindness. "I wanted you to know first," I said, swallowing. "I'm taking resignations from seventy-two of the best reporters, photojournalists and admin staff alive today. I think most of them will want to stay in Metropolis."

She was silent for another long moment. "Bastards froze the accounts?"

"We jumped right into the stewpot, Les."

"You know _we're_ still trying to stay out of it." She said it quietly, almost regretful, almost guilty.

"I _want_ you to stay out of it."

Another silence. "Have them send resumes to my office, not through HR. Make them triplicates. The ones I can't use, I'll take to the all-Metropolis editor's meeting Tuesday."

"Thank you, Les," I said simply. It seemed ridiculous to say "I owe you", as if I'd be able to pay her back.

She snorted. "Thank me," she said, "if you can _get_ them to resign."

And that was that.

Luthor was as clean as Kal had expected. The pride and prodigy of Suicide Slum; then theoretical physics out of our own U. of Metropolis; then recruited almost immediately into the initial shatterfall projects fifteen years ago, where Kal must have met him first.

And, of all miracles, he was one of six people in history to survive a shatterfall, making him a minor scientific hero. One of the early experiments had tragically succeeded in drawing one. He'd been on the far edge of the radius. Like the other survivors, he'd been largely well by six months later.

Except, like the others, that he never grew a hair on his body again.

Piecing even that much together took hours, online and in the University bookstacks. Whenever the tediousness got to be too much, I'd look up at the faces of the students around me, bent over their studies. Like J.J. would have been; or just like themselves, serious and focused. All of them would _say_ they knew, if I asked them, that a fall could come at any time. But did they realize they'd be turning a page, in mid-thought, and then - _God, stop it, Lane, stop it_.

And then I'd have to get up and take a walk, and look at the faces of the people passing me in the street instead - businesspeople and parents with infants, since the older kids were still in school - hearing my college Shakespeare.

_These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air._

_Lane, stop it._

_And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve…_

I wasn't sleeping well.

I hadn't been able to visit Lucy and my little twin nephews since it happened. I couldn't stand the thought of looking at their faces and thinking those words. Post-traumatic stress, Kal called it, and said survivors always recovered best in tiny towns in Kansas.

Back to work. Luthor had published well over a hundred papers on the shatterfalls. Stolid, unremarkable work. It took calling in three favors to get hold of his doctoral thesis.

My third time through the abstract, I admitted I was out of my depth. I couldn't believe what it seemed to be saying. Our physics correspondent took a look for me, without a murmur about how we would come up with his usual fee.

I was wrong, of course. It didn't say what I'd thought. It said something far stranger. Luthor's observer effect was increasing.

No, it was changing. It was becoming something different altogether.

The observer effect itself, the indeterminacy of a probabilistic event until you recorded it, had been demonstrable for the sixty years since it was first proposed. Most of Luthor's thesis was devoted to refining methods.

And then one footnote, like a teaser, had this. The earliest studies had toyed with going one step better. They led observers to _expect_ a single given outcome – 'the nucleus will decay'; or, 'it won't' - and then compared that with the reality. Expectation, as anyone who's experienced daily life could have predicted, had no effect on outcome at all.

Until sixty years later, a few years after the shatterfalls started, when Luthor tried it again.

It was a minimal effect, a half percentage point of probability this way or that. It took him over a thousand observations to demonstrate it at all. But it was real. What his subjects _expected_ to see was more likely to happen.

And he stuck it in a footnote.

"They would have laughed him out of the department," my correspondent explained. "It's a triumph of hubris that he put it in at all. You almost wonder if he cared whether he _got _the Ph.D. or not."

No wonder the man had spent the next fifteen years slipping Schrodinger's Cat into conversation whenever he could.

If the _original_ observer effect made Kal uneasy about the power placed in mortal hands, he was going to have a breakdown over this one. What it all meant, as usual, God only knew.

I wrote up the Luthor story and the latest shatterfall revelation. "Nicely done," Kal said softly from the couch, when he read them. "And scarcely believable," he added, pointing to the bit on Luthor's thesis.

Then he looked up at me and added, dryly, "But you need a disclaimer. Put these side by side as they are now, and Luthor will never make it to police custody. A mob of your readers will spot him and lynch him, and then expect the shatterfalls to suddenly stop."

Which, of course, was ridiculous. They had started when Luthor was a fourteen-year-old in Suicide Slum. Whatever he had to do with them now, whatever it all had to do with his observer effect, it was beyond reason to think he was the whole story.

I rolled my eyes and left Kal there, and went back into the kitchen to get the tea going. The list of possible unforeseen consequences of publishing was the last thing I wanted to think about more.

It had been dogging me since the day of the fall. If secrecy was so important to our enemies, if they had restricted their activities all these years to fit the high-energy attraction pattern we all believed in, God only knew how they would react when the cover was blown.

I poured the water over the teabags. There was no listing all the possibilities, or weighing all the risks, with such a thing.

I had even thought, for a day or two, of giving Luthor himself a chance to contact us, to see what he might say. "But what _could_ he say, that you could test the truth of?" Kal had answered. "And whatever you fear he might do, you'd be giving him the chance to do it _before_ you published."

I didn't realize how long I stood there, lost more in paralysis than in thought, till I looked down at the teas and saw they had gone dark. I shook my head, stirred in the sugar, and brought them back out. "_You_ write the disclaimer, then. I'll share the byline with you. I needed a way to end it, anyway…"

His eyes were closed, his chin on his chest, my printout in his lap.

I stopped in the doorway and watched him, the shock of black hair in front of his eyes, the rise and fall of his chest.

_How many falls today, Kal-El, besides the six that I know of? I remember when two in a week was bad. And yet fewer slip past you now than then._

_If it's true that your body needs three hours a night, how long have you gone without sleep, to make you fall asleep on my couch? _

_How long till you're so tired the sound of a pre-fall doesn't wake you? Or you drop a man in your exhaustion? Or crush him? _

_How old were you, when you first realized this was going to be your life? _

_And your team, God rest their prosaic souls, were right about this much: you can't keep it up alone forever._

I crept in, set down the teas without a sound, and opened my laptop. _ Time to post it, already. Maybe, maybe, someone can do something with this._

_Besides, what am I afraid will happen? More shatterfalls? _

I brought up our online site to post the articles. I hadn't seen it for a few days. When it came up this time, I blinked.

J.J.'s old friends on our web maintenance had taken down the picture of the old Globe on the day of the fall; the pages had been left spare and solemn. But some time in the few intervening days, they'd replaced it with a shot of Earth herself from space.

_Defiant, grandiose little boys_, I thought, and smiled sadly.

I blew up the image and looked at it for a moment, the crystalline sharpness of the green on the blue, the marbling of the white cloud veil above it, the gold fire of our yellow sun winking out behind it.

That shot would have to be over fifteen years old; no nation had tried a shuttle launch since the falls started. But she was lovely, our planet. She'd be darker at night now, if we could look down on her again. But no less lovely for that. That was when I thought of how to end my piece.

_What still remains unclear? _I typed, without taking my eyes off the screen. _The breadth of federal involvement, the goals and identities of the perpetrators, the source and secret of the technology. In short, nearly everything. _

_But what is finally clear is this. Earth is under attack. From some group of her own children, or from whatever alternatives may exist. It may be an attack in their eyes as well; or it may be a mining operation, a harvest. But to Earth, it is war. _

_She never sought this battle. She bore it patiently for fifteen years. She bore ten million deaths, another Holocaust, another Stalin's purge. She bore a return to worldwide poverty, after one short decade when the children of even Sudan and North Korea had finally had enough to eat. From fifty trillion dollars annually, her GDP has dropped to seven, and half her children never see their fifth birthdays. Without the work of the Man of Steel, her only adopted son, those estimates would be even more unprintable._

_Earth is patient. She waited, and studied, and tried to rebuild. She tried to find out what she had done, what natural phenomenon she had triggered, to bring this down on her head. But now she knows the truth: she has a living enemy. And one day she will find him._

_And one day, Earth will make reply._

I hit _send._

_That's for you too, Luthor. Let's see what that does with your expectation and outcomes._

Investigative reporters, I think, can't help being grandiose. The best we can do is know it.

Kal stirred behind me. I looked back, and his eyes opened on me.

We looked at each other for a long moment. Finally he gave me a little half-smile; there was nothing to say. Then he got up to go.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next night I gathered the investigative staff at Jimmy's place, to finish things. Everyone was there on time, a feat I'd never achieved at a single staff meeting in my career.

"Was it you who set the _Star_ on us, Lois?" someone asked mildly.

"You'd think we were unemployed, or something."

"Or maybe she thinks that after her last article, there's nothing left worth writing."

"Yeah, hell of a piece, Lois. Goosebumps, I had. Big huge ones."

I laughed and motioned them to silence. "All right, guys. Listen up. Maxwell got out of acute care yesterday. He's over in inpatient rehab now. Drop by and give him some love. He's the last one."

"Hey, Lois," said my new hire, the twentysomething who'd been there the night I met Kal at the fall scene, "you think there's any chance Superman would do our ribbon cutting when we reopen?"

_That _broke the mood. For a moment I was shocked by her ignorance, and it broke my heart that I was going to have to explain the obvious in front of everyone. From their sidewise glances at her, everyone else felt the same. Then I took a closer look and saw the irony on her face, and breathed a sigh of relief.

"That's fine. That's a good segue. So let me state the obvious here. This wasn't the kind of crackdown some of us were afraid of. Technically, the _Planet_ hasn't been closed. But we've got no building, and I've got not only no expense money for you, but no paychecks. And that's not going to change."

None of it news, but the room was completely silent. I sighed. No point drawing it out. "I'm going to accept your resignations so I don't have to lay you off. Then you're going to start _returning_ Les's calls, and you're going to be polite and grateful, and then you're going to say yes. She's sticking her neck out for you. She'll probably screw you with a pay cut – she's only human - but if it's more than fifteen percent, let me know."

I stopped, expecting the room to erupt into chatter, but the silence continued. I looked over at Jimmy, puzzled, and saw a funny little smile on his face.

That was when it occurred to me _everyone_ else had already been there before I arrived. How long before? Plotting what?

"Guess I'll go where my acting editor sends me," Jimmy said mildly. "Even undercover at the _Star._ Even if it's not the job I first signed up for." Heads nodded around the room.

Looking them over, bright faces with mischief in them, for all the world as if they hadn't just gotten the chastening of their lives, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Still living in the dream. But apparently, from the kinds of things I was posting, I was buying into it too.

Yes, but I didn't have a family to support.

"All right, guys. You're beautiful. I couldn't ask you for more. But there's not only no money. There's no work. I'm not holding out on you. _I don't have any leads_. Maybe this battle does belong to others."

"And if we ever _find_ a lead," my new hire said, in a bone-dry voice that reminded me of Kal at his most sarcastic, "the _Star_ will of course trip over itself to publish it yesterday."

I rolled my eyes. "What do you want from them? Two years ago _we_ were the worst of the lot. It's still honest work. There are still other things worth writing about. It's not always up to journalists to save the world."

But she was right, and my mind was running even while I was talking. The _Planet_ was dead, and not dead. What it really was, was bodiless. With servers in eighteen countries, and the ear of the world.

And seventeen cents in petty cash.

But what you can't see, you can't crush. A lot like the cults, actually. Except that they had money.

And we had Kal. Well, not _had_ him. But if we had to move a message…if we needed to post something from a different server in a different country every time…

_If you want to move up from closet felon to the Ten Most Wanted list. _

"It's just," Jimmy was saying, "that if we happened to come across something dangerous but worth publishing, we'd hate to ask the _Star_ to take the risk…if there's a perfectly good online paper that combines cutting-edge timing with flawless fact-checking…"

I couldn't help it any more. I broke down and laughed. What a disaster.

But…nothing said we had to be a major underground seditious publishing house. Just a channel for important news when it arose. Once a week or once a year, whenever it was needed. Couldn't I keep it all under my own name, and decide when it really was time to cut and run to Smallville?

"I'd steal all your bylines shamelessly," I heard myself saying.

"That _would_ be a change," someone said dryly, which was patently unfair. I laughed again.

Then I caught Jimmy's eye. "I thought we talked about _not_ being a hero."

He shrugged helplessly.

Fools.

But if Kal would help me, just maybe I could protect them, and we could run the one truly free press on the planet. On a very irregular publishing schedule.

Whistling in the dark. But shouldn't there be someone doing it?

"You'd have to teach me your posting protocols," Kal said, levelly, later that night.

I laughed.

"Lois," he said more softly, "It's very difficult to back down _after_ you become a symbol. You'll break spirits. This is one of the few graceful exit points you'll ever have. You may not want this tomorrow."

I shivered a little. "That's why I'm hurrying. And look," I added, bringing up the shot of Earth on the front page. "Isn't she lovely?"

Kal was silent for a long moment. "Oh, Lois," he said finally, "that doesn't even do her justice."

I went into the site code and added, "For one hundred and sixteen years, the _Daily Planet_ has published 'all the news that's fit to print'. After our ongoing reorganization, its focus will be narrowing. Future _Planet_ articles will be confined to the news too sensitive for physical papers to print. Send comments and questions to ActingEditor-at-PlanetInExilenet."

We looked at it for a moment in silence. I felt strangely light, almost giddy. No doubt it would wear off by tomorrow.

"Not a soldier any more, then," he said softly, looking at me. "A general."

"In the largely symbolic part of the war, yes. But maybe we'll have our day."

He raised his eyebrows. "The enemy thought the _Planet_ was dangerous enough as it was."

I turned round in my chair to face him. "_Now_ I think it's time for you to tell me what happened that day."

He shook his head. "Not yet." He gave me a little smile. "We don't all make decisions as quickly as you."

For forty-eight hours afterwards, we were the second most popular site on the web. Kind words and death threats poured in even faster than tips from lunatics. Far faster than I could keep up with. Kal sorted them for me in a few minutes each day, flipping through at a speed limited only by the laptop's response time. He might be missing things that were important, but there was no help for it.

But the first one he showed me was terrific. And, of course, anonymous.

_You're making people very angry, Lois Lane_, it started, without a greeting. _I haven't had so much fun in years. Had to be one of the first ten thousand people to welcome you underground. _

_Of course, you've also made my position more sensitive than ever. We all signed up to take the bullet some day, but apparently I'm in less of a rush than you are. May have something for you soon, though. _

_Give Perry my love._

Which, of course, I couldn't, but it warmed my heart to know his source was still at large.

And, for the moment, so was I. There was no Good Citizen case against me yet; receiving anonymous emails, and publishing work that merely embarrassed the government, were still legal. From other dangers, I'd be safer in Smallville; I'd be far more effective in Metropolis. Frequent comings and goings between them would be the worst of all worlds. I lived carefully, and we argued about it time and again.

And my contacts nationwide, and more contacts of Perry's worldwide than I'd known existed, started coming out of the woodwork to feed us again. They were a jittery lot, till they were satisfied the _Planet_ wasn't under new federal management, but their hearts were pure. I started to have visions of building an underground reporting empire. I saw Lucy and my twin nephews when I could, but told her precious little; it was an open secret, but I think we both felt safer with it all unsaid.

Things began to feel almost stable.

And then one night I asked Kal again what had happened the day he left the laboratory, and this time he told me.

First he looked at me for a moment, with the expression of a man who's put off something dreadful till even he's lost patience with himself. I had the strange feeling he was three or four conversations ahead of me, and didn't like what he saw.

Then he remembered the mug circled in his long fingers, and raised it to his lips. When he looked back at me, there was something different, something quieter in his eyes.

"Everything was glass and steel there," he said after a moment. "It was a laboratory; what else would it be? I was ready; they were titrating the kryptonite in the back room."

He looked almost embarrassed. "And then I thought suddenly that the windows were too high, and the children would be cold – absurdly, as if anyone had proposed _raising_ them there. Before they had learned even to walk, they'd spend each day looking up at the sunlight, wondering why they kept wanting so badly to feel it."

The image ambushed me. It hurt, unexpectedly, like a stab in a sore place. I winced, and he saw it. He looked at me wryly, as if seeing his own thoughts reflected, knowing they were silly, and still unable to escape them.

"None of it remotely true. Imagine, how attentively such children would be raised. They had volunteer couples, screened for their perfect balance of warmth and strength. But I couldn't help it."

"And then," and he laughed ruefully again, but with a strange, shaken undertone, "_then _I realized that in all these days of trying and planning, in all my reluctance and frustration, that was the first time I'd once felt compassion for the little things."

Kal looked back up at me and shook his head. "And think of that, Lois. Growing up in an alien world, raised with caution and precision, one day understanding you were being shaped for their needs. And then looking up into your father's eyes, and seeing suspicion looking back at you there too."

I didn't have to imagine. I could see it as if it were in front of me.

Because it was. This vision of his was too unconsciously precise. He wasn't imagining. He was remembering.

He saw it in my eyes; his own eyes widened a bit. "Lois," he said quickly, unwillingly, "my parents were the finest people I know."

I said nothing; this was territory he never let me enter. How could I confirm it, or deny it? It might be true, and I could still be right, both at once.

"But raising an alien, or half-alien, mind, teaching it good and evil – who do you choose for that task? What screening tests help you? How do you lay that job on the shoulders of a young couple who knows there's nothing of themselves in that child that they could call on? What do they do, when she turns two, and they realize that by the time she's four, her tantrums will be deadly? What _can_ they do, but hedge her round, from the cradle, with rules that must _never_ be broken?"

Then he caught my expression again, and apparently realized he was doing nothing to help his parents' case and gave up. If I hadn't felt so sick at heart, I would have laughed.

"I didn't have an alternative, of course," he said after a moment. "All I wanted was time to think. More time, again…it would have driven any team mad. But the way Luthor reacted seemed excessive, even for that." He opened his palms, as if to say, _and you know the rest_.

I sat back. I had no idea what to say. These were waters I knew nothing about, the borders of secrets he kept even closer than his human name. And they were, apparently, reaching out for him, over the miles and years from his childhood in Smallville.

_Weeks ago, you pulled back because of fear of these children. Will you pull back now out of compassion? And keep circling the world till you fall from the sky? _

"What now, then, old friend?" I said finally.

He sighed. "I still respect much of your government, Lois. But I don't trust them."

"Any farther than you can throw them, maybe?" I finished wryly. "Which is how far exactly?"

He gave me a brief flicker of a smile, and then took a breath. "I worked out a flight path when the acceleration of the falls started. I can circle the earth in twenty-four minutes, and pass within hearing distance of land that houses ninety-four percent of humanity. Most of the rest has little that would draw a shatterfall. There's time."

I blinked. It wasn't the falls themselves that were wearing him down. It was patrolling for them. No wonder little got past him now. _How many circles in a day?_

"Time? We both know you're at your limit. Time for what?"

He took another breath. "Time to try again, differently. Privately, as secretly as possible. With just one or two children at a time, born to one mother. To try to be a real father, and give them a real childhood. To watch their minds develop, knowing that between us, their mother and I have it in us to understand them. To see if this is an answer. Or not."

I blinked. He looked up at me, with a shadow of his old dry gleam. "I suspect the role of disciplinarian will fall to me as well."

And then his eyes dropped to the floor and he went on, quickly, without looking up, as if he were entering the final push. "I was thinking, maybe, of some cheerful Midwestern girl. Someone brave but not ambitious, ready to serve her people, happy enough in her community to need little from me."

"Someone simple – not stupid, but simple – enough," I added softly, understanding, "to love them without question."

He met my eyes silently. "It would be less intimidating, I thought, for my mother to find and canvass her first."

"Someone willing to try for a pregnancy," I mused, "as soon as could be managed."

"Five children or so, in total," he added. "Then the range of their hearing could blanket the earth. It wouldn't matter if they flew, or lifted buildings. With a reliable twenty-minute lead, they'd only need to give warning."

I said nothing. That about covered it.

"Lois," he said more softly, "I knew you wouldn't approve. Almost, I don't even want you to." He hesitated. "But I had hoped, if you were in Smallville…they'd be almost your nieces and nephews, in a way. Wouldn't they? I'd thought possibly, whatever I lacked or did wrong with them, you might notice it, and tell me..." He trailed off, and stared down at the table, with the look of a man trying to shape something out of smoke.

I opened my mouth to say something, before I realized that for once I had no idea what to say. Watching him for the last five minutes, I could see the ghost of the brave, frightened boy he'd been, in every move he made.

What did it mean for him, any of it? Apparently, that he had a hell of a lot of faith in Midwestern values. Or in his mother's eye for potential. There must have been good, too, in that childhood he didn't speak of, for him to trust her with that choice.

_Happy enough to need little from me._ There was a world of implied future in that. The unknowns of a life with a stranger – those were enough to make anyone tremble.

But was that even it? Or was I reading things in again?

_Or is it maybe even simpler than that?_

I came halfway around the table and sat in the chair around the corner from him. "Kal," I said softly, "I need to understand something."

He looked up at me, with that hesitant look of one who suspects what's coming.

"Is it so repulsive to you?"

He raised his eyebrows.

"Does it seem bestial, maybe? Literally, like being asked to lie with a beast?"

He met my eyes like a boy taking his medicine, here at the end of all his secrets. "Is that what you think?" he asked back, very softly.

I shook my head. "I don't know. I've wondered. I've wondered if, if things were different, you might have found some happiness in love. Or if it's somehow more against your nature than anyone imagines. That wouldn't be shameful. There's nothing to be ashamed of. I just want to understand. I was just thinking, about all the hundred things that could seem terrible about this, and then I thought I might be overlooking the most obvious of all."

He shook his head, and thought for a moment before he spoke. "It's not repulsive. Not that that would matter; I'm done with involving third parties. It's true, I don't know how I may react, what silent parts of my ancestors might wake in me. I don't know what one speaks about afterward, or how things change around it." He hesitated, eyes fixed on the table. "I don't know what I would say to her, if she were…afraid."

I started to try an answer, but he was hurrying on.

"But more, I think, I don't know how one takes on this work, side by side with another person, to raise such children and be good to them. But everyone has to learn these things, don't they?" He laughed, with a strange, tense note in his voice. "Imagine, Lois – would you inflict me as a father, as I am now, on _any_ child?"

I laughed with him, painfully. It was becoming clearer and clearer how little he _could_ know about what made a normal childhood. He had seen the best of intentions turn out poorly. Why should he believe me, if I tried to comfort him with promises that this time it couldn't happen?

_Especially if the girl he finds mistakes his caution for sternness. The way everyone does, the way I used to._

"Kal," I said after a moment, without quite knowing why. "With a man's understanding, now…did anything happen, at your parents' hands, that you might call abuse from another?"

He looked back at me for a long moment, and I had the strange feeling he understood the question better than I did. "No. There was nothing like that in them. They just had a very difficult task."

We were silent for a moment – him no doubt reviewing the demographics of the Midwest, and me looking at his broad back bent over the table. At this faithful son, this boy who had picked up the world at seventeen and never set it down again.

I thought about my own first time, at seventeen years old myself, in the back of a pickup with my boyfriend of the time. A boy I'd liked well enough; but, really, just the boy I was with on the day I decided I'd had enough of being Lois the preacher's kid.

I'd looked up into his eyes afterward, and realized with a chill that he thought he loved me. And watched his face, as he realized that what was looking back at him was nothing of the kind.

_But love _can _grow with time. It wouldn't always be like that for him. And they're not all as cold as you were back then. More likely, she'd worship him._

_And we all know how comfortable _that_ makes him. _

_And if he did something foolish, or started meddling with prison sentencing again, would she stop him?_

And I knew, with the silent instant absoluteness of a shatterfall, with what Dad would have called the voice of God, that it was enough. That I could send no more brave and frightened boys into the world alone, to protect my people, with a _"Be careful."_

"And would it be easier," I said softly, "with a friend whose love you have already?"

I almost thought he'd jump, but he didn't; I nearly jumped myself. I think for a moment he was too shocked to move. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then turned his head and opened them on me.

I was surprised; it wasn't grief or embarrassment looking back at me. Just compassion.

"Poor human soldier," he said softly. "You've given up enough for your people. They don't need your body, too. That's one job another _can_ do." A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Did you give this little thought to taking the _Planet_ renegade?"

I answered, even as I realized the thought had, in some form, been fermenting for months. "That may be the smoothest change of subject you've ever attempted on me."  
"Ever been _caught_ at," he corrected, with a trace of his old gleam in his eye. Then he paused. "I love your heart, Lois," he said more seriously. "But it's not up for discussion. Forgive me for drawing it out of you. The fault was mine. I shouldn't run here with my every worry, as if it were yours to solve."

"Would it," I said softly, half to myself, "be _more_ of a burden with me, and not less? I could believe that. It wouldn't offend me."

"You're treating this," he answered mildly, "as if it were a conversation we were actually having."

I laughed a little. "Laying the ground rules. The conversation hasn't started."

He stood, covered my hand with his, and laid his other hand on my head for a moment. They were shaking. "Good night, Lois. Thank you." He turned to go.

"Please," I said mildly, "don't make me grab your cape again."

He stopped, there with his back to me, that brilliant cape falling from his shoulders. "All right," he said finally. He turned, and folded his arms across his chest. "I know this isn't the world I was a boy in, where people married for love and had children for happiness. But you know you have my protection, such as it is, already. And your world doesn't need you for this."

He paused, as I watched him silently. His face softened a bit and he came back across the room toward me. More gently, he said, "And you know better than anyone that I'm not prepared to make a wife happy. I know what I'm able to do and what I'm not."

He fell silent, and we looked at each other across the room. Five years ago, maybe he would have been right. "Okay," I said mildly. "What else? Or is it my turn?"

He laughed incredulously.

I sighed and got up from the table and came around in front of him. "Tell me it's not what you want, that your first plan would be better for you. Or that you don't know, and you need to think. Or tell me plainly, if you'd want me to consider it, if not for your absurd suppositions."

"You feel this way tonight," he answered softly, without meeting my eyes. "No one can sustain it for a lifetime. No one should have to."

I raised my eyebrows. "I'll take that as option three, then."

He wouldn't meet my eyes; he didn't answer. I was trembling with my own audacity.

"We're both what our world made us, Kal. What happiness do you think you'd cut me off from, that I'll long for so bitterly? The career and family that await me in my life in exile?"

"Smallville isn't exile!"

"Sorry. Slip of the tongue. I _meant_ 'Smallville.'"

Kal laughed, almost involuntarily. He sobered again the next moment. "Don't you think I know you've given up your future? But who knows what could change in one year, or two? You might have a chance at…the pursuit of happiness."

He hesitated a moment, and then went on. "And what you forget is that I'm _not_ what this world made me."

He straightened above me; his massive chest rose with his indrawn breath. "You forget how many, many hundred things may be different between us, Lois. Things you can't right now imagine."

I straightened myself, and looked up at him. "Do you think that's still frightening to me? If you know something that would really throw me, tell me now."

Kal blinked, and then a little smile tugged at his lips. "It wasn't a bluff," he said mildly. "Just a concern."

"Don't you think," I said softly, "that I know that?"

"Don't you think," he said, more softly, "that what we have now would be a sad thing to spoil, if it's true?"

I blinked. I might be terrified, but at least I wasn't so grim.

Or maybe, horribly, this whole conversation was a mistake. Maybe this was the _last_ thing he wanted, and he was trying to turn me down gently, and I was a fool to keep taking aim at his arguments.

Or maybe the poor man was trying to tell me, and really thought I didn't understand, that he had no idea if he could come to love a human like a husband loves a wife. And that he thought that might break me, if not at first, then at last.

_But I didn't ask him for that._

_He looks at me now, and all he sees is the infinity of ways to lose something, all the waveforms collapsing to the same end. The only thing I _can_ do is try to take that fear away, and let him choose._

I sighed, and reached down to take his hands between mine. "What is it you think I want from you, Kal? What has the potential to spoil so badly? I know what your life is like and why. And I love you for it. That's all."

Kal looked back, unblinking, half-believing.

"Believe that I love you enough to do this. Without regretting it, and without expecting you to change. And enough to be glad you trusted me with the truth, if this would really bring you more trouble than help." I paused. "Make your choice, Kal-el, today or not today. Don't be afraid."

He was staring at me, eyes wide and raw. "Believe all that? I don't know," he said shakily, softly, "how to even _imagine_ it."

I slid my arms around him, closed my eyes and laid my head against his chest, hearing the pounding of that massive heart. Wishing his believing were as simple as my saying it.

And conscious slightly, this time, in a different way, of the width and solidity of that chest, of the strength of the arms that came around me. And of the weight of him – but then, he'd never let it rest on me.

"Lois," he said softly, almost whispering, "I'm not J.J."

That killed me, that he thought he might be the stand-in for the workings of my guilt. I sighed again, and shook my head against him. "Well, I sure as hell wouldn't be making this offer to him."

"You don't know what you're saying," he murmured.

"Strictly speaking," I answered dryly, "_I_ know better than you do."

He laughed once, and then I felt the movement in his chest as he shook his head above me. "Even on _that_ subject, which I wasn't addressing…think of it, no option for abstinence at the proper times. And it's hardly lovemaking we're discussing here, regardless, is it?"

I laughed. "So doing it for the sex is out?"

"It hasn't," he said dryly, "been the highlight of the experience to date."

"My turn now," I answered. His hands moved to my shoulders; he stepped back, without letting go.

"My fertility plateaued ten years ago. In three years it will start to drop. We might, or might not, be able to finish. You should know that."

"Five or so children in as many years," he said softly. "It would wear out your little body."

"Mine was built for children. More than yours was for kryptonite."

He pulled back and looked at me. "Using kryptonite," he said softly, "isn't optional. Regardless of…anything."

I thought about that for a moment. "So you were thinking about putting your _life_ in a stranger's hands?"

He looked faintly amused. "_Am_ thinking. You would have thought of a better idea?"

"I would have thought until I had one!"

"I tried. For over a month."

_Yes, while I pestered you._

"Kal," I said reluctantly, because there was no going back from full disclosure, "is it dangerous? The pregnancy."

He hesitated a moment, clearly reluctant to make my case any easier, and then gave up and answered. "I'm as sure as I can be," he said carefully, "that it would be no more so than any other. There's nothing in my chemistry that should make it toxic. And the…powers…don't develop before contact with sunlight. My ship hit ground at night, and I was covered with bruises from its landing. It wasn't till the sun rose in the morning…" He trailed off. "So it would be possible to end it, if necessary. We made sure of that much, before planning our first attempt."

And that left us there, looking at each other, with everything laid out and nothing left to say.

I looked at him, standing perfectly still. I'd expected to feel horrified at my own daring, gnawed by second thoughts, everything sounding utterly different when spoken aloud.

And I did. But not so much. Not too much.

"Well, then," I said.

Kal looked at me for a long moment. "Lois," he said finally, his lip quirking up, "do you know what I thought of, when _I_ thought of this?"

I beat down a smile myself. "What?"

"I thought," he said, growing solemn again, "that if you ever bore children, you'd be a tigress in defending them. That they'd be safe with you, if anything happened to their father. That there would be some love in you for both halves of their souls." He hesitated.

Dizzyingly romantic, it wasn't.

But maybe that was his point. His warning, that his reasons might always be different from mine.

"Selfishly," he said after a moment, half-laughing at himself, "I hated the thought of looking in your eyes every day, seeing the weight there and knowing it came from me."

He looked up. "But what I didn't want to admit," he went on, holding my eyes, "was that that wasn't the real question. What mattered was whether you could still take joy in them, and be content in their happiness, whether you were happy or not."

And that, I realized, _was_ his point. He was saying he didn't believe me. That he was certain I'd grow weary of sharing his life. And that that was all right.

The only promise he needed was that his children wouldn't pay.

That was frustrating.

But there it was, wasn't it? The first test of whether I really meant the things I'd told him. Because if so, then it wasn't for me to write how this had to play out, how he had to see it, what _his _reasons had to be.

_All right, then. I'll offer you what you _will_ take. And the rest, we'll figure out, one day at a time. God willing, you'll be wrong. I think, for a moment there, you _did_ believe me. _

"I think I could, Kal," I said finally. "If I _am_ a terrible mother, that won't be why." I hesitated. "I wish your life hadn't taught you to ask that question."

His eyes widened, and he said nothing.

"Besides which," I added, "twins run in my family."

Kal gave me a flicker of a smile. And then we looked at each other and the silence stretched out; everything in it was changed, charged with too much meaning. Like the moments after a shatterfall, when bonds broke and rearranged themselves, into something that looked the same, but was very, very different.

"Lois," he said finally, softly, "You almost make me think you mean it."

"But nowhere near," I said, a little sadly, "make you stop dreading it."

Kal shook his head. He understood too well. "You think I don't trust your heart. There's nothing I trust more." He looked me over, as if he were fixing me in his mind. "But I can grieve a little, can't I, over sending you into a battle I can't fight?"

There was nothing I could say to that. I shook my head, denying something, not sure what. He looked away first, to the floor, and then back up at me. He started something once, twice, and then shook his head. "Let's speak again," he said finally. "Later." He hesitated. "I won't hold you to anything you said tonight, you know. You shouldn't hold yourself."

"All right," I said, my heart still pounding, from God knew what brew of reactions.

"All right."

He turned to go, in his usual way, and got almost to the door. Then he turned back, laughing once, helplessly. "Unless there was anything else you wanted to cover tonight? Because what kind of exit I _should_ make, after such a conversation, is beyond me. Another human knack I should have learned."

I laughed myself, and then realized how infectious his was, how strangely light he looked in that one moment, as if he'd shed the world's weight in the last hour.

We weren't _so_ different.

"Go home, Kal. I meant what I said."

"I know," he answered. Then he was gone.

It occurred to me, absurdly, that five years ago the the counterfeminist implications alone would have paralyzed me.

Jimmy was running the _Star_ darkroom by the end of the next week. Perry was finally hitting his ideal weight and pretended to be outraged at the new depths I'd led the _Planet_ to. It was days before I realized it had never even occurred to me to consider telling them.

_Someday, maybe._

Kal and I spoke again at the end of the week. He was gentle, careful, precise, searching me for any change of heart. It would have been a lovely scene, if not for the Tucson shatterfall that interrupted it. And so I was a bit rushed in telling him to make up his mind already, because I already had.

What I remember best is the near-disbelief in his eyes, as he backed away toward the balcony doors. "Thank you," he said softly, as if he didn't trust himself with longer words. "You almost make me think this might end well." Then he looked back over his shoulder, and back at me, and said helplessly, "I'll be back."

"Go on," I said, laughing despite myself. "This wouldn't feel right _without_ a fall."

I sat looking at the door for a few moments after he left. I wondered if I should be numb, or full of solemn plans and purpose. I'd have to get a thermometer, to follow my body temperature over the month. I wondered what my dad would have said about the mercies of his God this past month, letting me see that my old plans were gone first, so I'd never be tempted to blame the new ones.

I wondered, irrelevantly, if the home of Kal's mother had internet access already. Or if there were some way I could get it at the Fortress. Then I realized I was shaking. Then I decided that was probably all right.

After all, it wasn't exactly, I thought absurdly, the job we'd first signed up for.


End file.
